Luigi Pirandello’s classic, “Right You Are, If You Think You Are,” is the leitmotif of a thoughtful and insightful post by Roger L. Simon at Pajamasmedia.com. The famous play, he says, “came immediately to mind when I read the results of the new Rasmussen poll reporting 53% of Americans see our country headed for a Depression similar to the 1930s.” Now, he continues, “the question is whether this will be a self-fulfilling prophecy,” in fact President Barack Obama seems “to be encouraging this.”It’s quite the same here in Italy, but curiously, while in the US the “jinx” is the ruling Administration, in Italy, as noted here a couple of days ago, the wet blanket is the center-left opposition. As a result of this game with reversed roles, while the left-leaning US President seems to be mostly engaged in imposing “cap-and-trade schemes,” the right-leaning Italian Prime minister seems to actually prefer more “traditional” and effective ways to stimulate the real economy.
“What strikes me now more than ever,” says Roger Simon,
is how deeply psychological all things economic are. Of course, we have all always known that, and of course there are substantive matters like a world’s worth of unpaid mortgages and weird paper that would turn Bernard Baruch into a pretzel, but still, investors have to have some measure of faith in the economy for business to continue in capitalist society. For the moment, that’s gone. It’s more like “Wrong You Are, If You Think You’re Right.”
Pirandello, I’m sure, would have appreciated the irony.
President Obama is giving too many mixed messages. Sometimes he's warning that the crisis will get worse before it gets better. Then he's cheerleading, saying we will always come back. Yada, yada. No wonder the markets haven't been too happy with him.
ReplyDeleteIt would also help if his folks would get their act together and propose a specific and realistic plan. I often wonder if they're all just sitting around hoping the problems will solve themselves.
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Wednesday shows that 37% of the nation’s voters now strongly approve of the way that President Obama is performing his role as President. This is, in my view, a tribute to the fact that the school systems no longer educate, rather they indoctrinate, and the media no longer informs -- they propagandize.
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