Interesting economics observation on the Obama Administration – Centralized Planning?

Yes, President Bush unlocked the door and opened it a crack ("forced to sacrifice free market principles to save the free market") to set the stage….

This is one huge reason that:

• Be careful of what you do, for the Law of Unintended Consequences always lurks
• They guy coming after you may take advantage of "the crises" in ways you would have NEVER imagined

And certainly, Obama has made full use of that crack and is the process of blowing the doors off the free market with:

• nationalizing the domestic auto market (vs the transplants)
• nationalizing the top firms of the financial market
• nationalizing the educational loan marketplace
• regulating the domestic energy marketplace into a straight jacket with lots of new taxes and decreasing access to domestic energy stores
• Starting the take over of the national healthcare market

Thus, I found this rather frightful (emphasis mine):

If ever someone wanted an example of the misguided hubris exhibited by the economic central planners that seem to dominate the Obama Administration, one perhaps need look no further than the following quote from President Obama’s chair of the Council of Economic Advisors Dr. Christina Romer, who ended an interview on MSNBC this morning with the following:

"I’m working 24/7 to make this economy better."

There are two explanations for this statement: 1) Dr. Romer thinks you’re ignorant about economics; or 2), Dr. Romer has deluded herself into thinking that one person’s command-and-control decisions can materially "make the economy better."

Remarkable.

No, not that that Tom Elia said what he did about Dr. Romer.  Rather, that it IS the case that the Obama Administration believes that it can manage the US economy with a vibrancy that has been the US economy.

Look, in a free market economy, millions of people make individual decisions that decide what is to be done, what is not to be done, with price being the signal being the intermediary between supply and demand.  There is no way that a centrally planned Ivory Tower can suitably take that place of, effectively, a crowd sourced decision making process.

But given Obama’s self-professed proclivity towards "socialists and Marxists" (according to his own books), why should we be surprised?  Remember, it is he that proclaimed that "we are days from transforming America" – sometimes, one should take people at their word."

(H/T: Cafe Hayek via NH Watchdog and Jorge)