Dec 31^st

Today we hear from Thomas Sowell; Dr. Sowell is an economist with a doctorate from the University of Chicago. Economics has been called the “dismal science” by Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish philosopher. Carlyle also said, “Teach a parrot the terms supply and demand, and you’ve got an economist.” Of course Carlyle was writing in the 1800s and everything is more complicated now. He still seems right about “dismal” though because Sowell, as usual, is far from cheerful.

He is unhappy with 2015 and particularly with the Iran agreement. “We let the world know that we were giving up any effort … to stop Iran from getting a nuclear bomb.” The agreement with Iran also includes Great Britain, Germany, France, Russia and China but Sowell mentions only the US as “giving up;” and of course, as is typical of conservatives, he offers no alternative plan.

Sowell then turns to Benghazi and Secretary Clinton’s comments about the Benghazi attacks that killed four Americans, including out Ambassador. The conservatives, lead by Congressman Trey Gowdy, are still hammering away at the Secretary’s initial description of the attack as being motivated by a film instead of by a terrorist group. The eleven hours of grilling by Gowdy’s committee is reduced by Sowell to “Mrs. Clinton melodramatically crying out ‘What difference does it make?’”  The “melodrama” here is produced entirely by Sowell who goes on to make the unlikely case that if the Benghazi attack had been labeled a terrorist action then President Obama would have lost the 2012 election. Sowell believes that it would have detracted from the killing of Osama bin Laden which he reminds us was really carried out not by the President but by a team of Navy Seals. Sowell seems to believe that the President should have been on the scene himself.

Then he takes on his own party and accuses them of lying. “The most recent budget deal showed that Congressional Republicans lied wholesale when they said they would defund Obama care, Planned Parenthood and other pet projects of Democrats.” Sowell might have a Ph.D. in economics but he knows next to nothing about politics. The new Speaker of the House was not about to shut down the government again and again have his party take the blame for it. This meant that there had to be some compromise, a dirty word for most conservatives and apparently for Dr. Sowell.  The Republicans made 50 attempts to gut the Affordable Care Act; none of them made it through the Senate and the Republican House knew these actions were never going to reach the President’s desk. They thereby wasted untold hours of what might have been constructive compromise. It was far more important for these legislators to be seen as trying to obstruct the President than to pass effective legislation.

Sowell’s column today, on the last day of the year is noteworthy, not because of his hostility to all things progressive, that’s understandable. He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and such hostility toward progressives is expected of him. It is noteworthy, however, that he says absolutely nothing about any of the Republicans vying for his party’s nomination. I believe that discussing Trump, Cruz and other candidates would produce a more dismal outlook than even an economist could bear.