John Derbyshire on Obama as Juan Peron:
Count me in with Mark Steyn and Andy McCarthy: no increase in the debt limit, no way, under any kind of deal. Let’s end the phoniness. (Which is epitomized by the very expression “debt limit.” If Congress can, and does, raise the limit any time expenditures look like breaking through it, in what sense is it a “limit”? The only real limit on how much you can borrow is how much other people are willing to lend you.) The crisis must come, and the longer it’s delayed, the worse it will be.
The more I look at the history of our national debt and federal spending, the more it seems to me that the dominant economic outcomes of the post-WW2 era owe little to Keynes, Hayek, Friedman, or any of the other big names economists toss around. These were mere philosophers, in the same relation to our political decisions as the Christian theologians of the Middle Ages were to the actual behavior of European princes.
The guiding spirit of fiscal management in the advanced world this past half century has in fact been Juan Perón, who ruled Argentina from 1946 to 1955 (and again, but inconsequentially, 1973–4).
Read the whole thing, which includes a choice passage from Paul Johnson’s epic Modern Times on Peron, and a surprisingly hopeful conclusion from the man who wrote We Are Doomed.
Related: “ABC’s The Note Asks: How Much Longer Can Obama’s Approval Rating Defy Political Gravity?”
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