The Haitian people are suffering from the devastation of the recent earthquake. There was tremendous loss of life. For many of them, the grinding poverty that they had been living through before has only been intensified. Many more orphans roam the streets. It is a painful situation.

A Mandate from the People?

Scott Brown, the winner of the Massachusetts Senate seat of the late Teddy Kennedy, is one of a short but growing list of Republicans who weren’t supposed to win. It appears to some political fortune tellers that a backlash is growing to a hyperactive Democratic agenda of the prior year. Could it possibly be a “mandate from the people?”

Robert Shiller wrote a recent New York Times editorial, suggesting that the United States Government sell shares of the gross domestic product (GDP), similar to how corporations sell stocks. Mr. Shiller is obviously a very smart person. He is an economics professor at Yale University and authored various books on finance and the economy. He should know what he is talking about. So let’s look a little closer at his proposal.

A Penny saved is a penny earned. That is an old saying that we don’t hear much these days. The fact is that our grandmas knew what they were talking about. There is more power in that statement than even she could imagine. The underlying idea is that it takes effort or sacrifice of some sort to earn money. By saving that penny, we can have money in our pocket without having to work or expend any effort.

“Enthusiasm is like running in the dark. You might get there, but you might also get killed.” I don’t know the origin of that quote, but it seems to be appropriate for today’s politicians. To say that current economic events are challenging is a vast understatement. They are running around in the dark, trying this and that, hoping to find the magic pill to make everything better. What’s worse is that many people in this country are demanding that they run around in the dark, believing that they are superheroes with laser vision.

The phrase “First do no harm” is typically associated with the requirements of the Hippocratic Oath, the pledge by physicians to use their training for the good of the patient. It also can be stated as “the cure may be worse than the ill.” If you aren’t careful, good intentions may lead to bad results.

Many decades ago, George Orwell wrote a book called Animal Farm. It used a farm as a metaphor for society and depicted the transformation of a productive enterprise into a totalitarian regime. The progress toward dictatorship took small steps that were held to be in the best interests of “the people.” Equality of conditions was affirmed as the highest ideal. The redistribution of wealth from the productive led to universal dependency and slavery, which are the ultimate end results of socialism.

The science of weather forecasting has come a long way. They have significantly improved their ability to predict trends in the weather due to enhanced measurement of specific variables, better understanding of the physical laws that rule their interaction, and the implementation of incredibly complex computer programs. That vast improvement means that now they can forecast out for a few days with a relatively high degree of accuracy.

If you want to convince people of a point of view that has no real logical support, an effective method is to frame your opponent’s case in a way that makes it seem like something different than it really is. It is called a straw man argument because, just as clothing stuffed with straw has no real substance and is easily blown over, a straw man argument takes all of the substance out of an opponent’s case and substitutes false arguments that are easily refuted. By refuting the false arguments, you can claim that all arguments are refuted.

A century and a half ago, Hans Christian Anderson wrote the classic tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” It is a story about the vanity and intellectual snobbery of the upper crust of society. In it, a vain king cared about nothing but his clothes and how he looked. A couple of weavers promised the king a new suit of clothes that could not be seen by anyone who is stupid and not fit for his political office. They pretended to weave the invisible cloth and told the king how exquisite it was.