It goes without saying that if Bush had presided over a phony end to the Iraq war, expanded the Afghanistan war, extended its reach into Pakistan, solidified the state secrets doctrine and claimed in no uncertain terms the right to assassinate American citizens without due process, the left would be up in arms. The partisan hypocrisy concerning war-related issues is clear.

But what about economic and domestic policy? What if the Bush administration had sunk the country another trillion dollars into debt with the explicit promise that his plan was all that could prevent a 9% unemployment rate – only to then stumble for a year with an unemployment rate closer to 10%? What if the Bush administration had imposed a mandate forcing Americans to patronize the health insurance industry? What if the Bush administration had been in place for these two years since the financial collapse, overseeing an obviously sheepish economy whose only signs of recovery are transparently superficial and temporary bumps in consumption and the employment for census workers? And speaking of “transparency,” what if Bush had vowed to have his deliberations with the medical industry out in the open, to put every major bill on the web before it was voted on, and to have the health care debate on C-Span for all the world to see, only to renege totally on these assurances and every other promise of transparency? What if the Bush administration had simultaneously designated carbon to be a “pollutant” while proposing to create a market in the right to pollute, with credits given to big firms to be bought and sold on Wall Street? What if the Bush administration had overseen the BP oil spill, with regulatory agents asleep at the wheel and had decided, unilaterally, to cap the company’s liability? What if the Bush administration had won an election on one major domestic promise – to take the corruption and chaos out of the financial markets and steady the economy back on track – only to preside over an expansion of the power of the very same agencies that led the markets astray, all the while those markets showed little sign of improving? What if the Bush administration had established such a flurry of ad hoc interventions as to frighten investors away from wanting to invest in the private economy?

I think there would be no end to the criticism from the left, if indeed Bush were doing what Obama has done. Now, the two presidents do have some differences in policy and even a bigger difference in rhetoric. But it is conceivable that much of what has happened since January 2009 could have happened on Bush’s watch, and while some conservatives might be less critical than they are now, even more tellingly, most left-liberals would be much, much more critical than the are now.

In his first news conference since May, Obama has defended his economic policies, once again. It is the same old balderdash we always hear from him and most Democrats: Progress has been made. The government has saved us from a fate too terrible to imagine. And if November proves to be an electoral referendum on the economy, “the Democrats will do very well,” Obama confidently says.

To the extent the economy is still suffering, what is the problem? Why, the Republicans, of course. They are refusing to work together in “a better spirit of cooperation,” which the president humbly takes some blame for failing to promote – a fact he assures us he is as frustrated about as anyone. So he does admit some fault – he thought that those evil, uncooperative Republicans could be brought to the table, but he was too naive in his charity toward them. Poor guy.

What else can be blamed? Why, the tax cuts on “the rich,” of course. The left-liberal Washington Post loyally echoes the Democratic line: “Extending tax cuts for those higher-income households – something Republicans favor – would cost the federal government $700 billion over the next 10 years.” Oh no! We wouldn’t want to “cost the federal government” by letting people retain a bit more of their money. And $700 billion over the next ten years? Holy smokes! That’s $70 billion a year – that’s almost 2% of projected federal spending for 2011. All we have to do is raise taxes on the rich five or six times over, and maybe we can close the deficit. (Putting aside the hard reality that raising taxes so much would hamper the economy even more, discourage wealth creation, and certainly fail to bring in the budget shortfall.)

The real problem is spending, which Democrats seem incapable of ever conceding. The U.S. government spends close to $4 trillion and the Dems hone in on the $70 billion that can supposedly be “saved” by letting some tax cuts expire. Almost a trillion goes to the bloated military establishment they claim to want to trim and laughably accuse Republicans of being uniquely extravagant on. Obama has increased “defense” spending more than enough to make up for this $70 billion a year, but such points are not to be discussed. All we get from these guys, who promised a line-by-line examination of the federal budget and a weeding out of waste, is the occasional display of surreal pride in cutting $100 million worth of spending in some areas while increasing it by hundreds of billions in others, as though this pathetic cut isn’t so microscopic so as to make the Republicans’ own miniscule promises of government cuts seem revolutionary in comparison.

But Democrats are only quite this absurd when in power. Can you imagine how they’d respond if Bush had busted the budget this much, had triumphantly boasted that he cut $100 million from a budget 38 thousand times as large, or had claimed fiscal responsibility or economic success of any sort even as the deficit skyrocketed and unemployment remained higher than in a generation? He would be mocked, ridiculed, shunned and held up as the very example of a man unfit to be president if ever there was one. He would be treated as a self-evident instance of how an arrogant destroyer of the economy, a liar and a fool could become president of the United States, and why it means we must be vigilant in our questioning of authority – for dissent is the highest form of patriotism. Add in the insane unwinnable wars, the surveillance state and detention policy, and Bush, if he were still president, would be pointed out by the left as an example of a would-be despot, a clueless war criminal, a very dangerous and deluded man whose fingers must be removed from the levels of power before he causes even more damage to America and to the world.

And if Bush were president, he would deserve every bit of this seditious disrespect. So why are so many people who should know better still defending Obama?

Joining the growing tide of those calling for an end to federal regime uncertainty, Moody’s economist Mark Zandi, a frequent adviser to Congressional Democrats, on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on the importance of quickly extending the tax cuts scheduled to expire at year end:

I wouldn’t raise anyone’s taxes in 2011. I mean, I think the recovery is just too fragile and we can’t take that chance. . . . In my view, the reason why businesses aren’t hiring—the key reason is because of a lack of confidence. They’re just nervous, flat out nervous. And we have to provide some certainty in [taxation]. From an economic perspective, the sooner the better.

As cited in today’s Wall Street Journal.

The Cordoba House Islamic community center, scheduled for construction on private land within a few blocks of where the Twin Towers once stood, has drawn ire from many Americans, many of whom have provocatively called it the “Ground Zero Mosque” and have condemned it as offensive, and many of whom have called on the government to step in and prevent the center’s construction, in violation of both the private property rights of the owner of the land as well as the principles of religious toleration that make America a great country.

Defenders of the construction project have pointed out that the building is not a mosque, but a community center — essentially a Muslim version of the YMCA. Opponents have snapped back that the building will in fact have a mosque in it.

But according to Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who is spearheading the project, the center will also include separate places of prayer for Christians and Jews. And while some have said the project’s backers should instead give money to a 9/11 memorial, the Imam says the center will also have “a multifaith memorial dedicated to victims of the Sept. 11 attacks.”

Some have pointed out the supposed bad taste of building any sort of house of Muslim prayer near Ground Zero, but this assumes that Islam was the culprit on 9/11. It wasn’t. And even moderate defenders of the “Ground Zero mosque” will try to differentiate between radical and moderate Islam—but radical Islam is not really the reason behind the 9/11 attacks, either. The motivation was revenge for U.S. foreign policy, and although that certainly doesn’t excuse the atrocity, there is nothing unique about Islam, fundamentalist or not, that is needed to explain this act of revenge. As Robert Pape’s extensive research decisively shows, even the particularly gruesome spectacle of suicide bombing has little to do with religious extremism per se—many suicide bombers are not Muslim and even secular—and much more to do with resistance against a foreign occupier.

When Americans went to war after 9/11, revenge was a motivator there, too. But Americans’ religion had little to do with it. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 2006, this too was likely an act of revenge (or as some would claim, self-defense) against Hezbollah. The fact that the Israelis were mostly Jewish was not the major factor. Geopolitics and war in the region, as well as in U.S. conflicts with the Muslim world, do relate to religious questions. But it is not Islam, or Christianity, or Judaism, that is responsible for these acts of violence.

The Lebanese seem to understand this distinction, as they appear to support the reconstruction of a synagogue that was destroyed in the Israeli invasion of their country in 2006. Lebanon’s own “Ground Zero” synagogue is a good example for Americans of how to distinguish between belligerents that attack your country and the religion they happen to belong to.

Newt Gingrich bellowed that so long as Saudi Arabia doesn’t allow churches or synagogues, Americans shouldn’t tolerate a mosque near Ground Zero. As though this should be our standard. But in any event, while many Muslim nations are quite theocratic, a few do allow relative freedom for Christians and Jews. Sharia law does not bind non-Muslims in Kazakhstan, Turkey and Mali. The world’s Muslims are not a monolith, and if the Lebanese don’t hold Israel’s belligerence against their small Jewish minority—as they shouldn’t—then neither should Americans hold the violence of some Saudis and Egyptians on 9/11 (all hailed from these nations, our allies) against our much bigger Muslim minority. Nor should we hold it against the Muslims in the rest of the world—in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran or Pakistan—who have nothing to do with 9/11 at all.

Meanwhile, some Americans are planning to burn the Quran on 9/11 this year. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and General David Patraeus are right that this is an incendiary act—far more intentionally offensive, it would seem to me, than the mosque building—and that it could motivate more Muslims to hate Americans. But as Ron Paul points out, such U.S. officials are ignoring the real American-caused incitement of anti-American violence and terrorism: U.S. foreign policy. It is foolish, offensive, ugly, stupid and probably immoral for Americans to burn the Quran in such a display of religious animosity. But on the other hand, at least these Americans are planning to destroy their own private property—the U.S. military and State Department, as a matter of course, loot and destroy the private property of other people, Americans and foreigners alike. Worse, U.S. wars have killed hundreds of thousands of foreigners in just the last decade or so. This is by far the bigger problem, and Hillary and the general should focus on what they can do to reduce anti-American hatred. Burning the Quran is terrible. But bombing and burning foreign mosques and killing women and children would seem to me much worse, by practically any moral standard.

Moreover, this whole notion that Ground Zero is “hallowed ground” is itself religiously offensive to me, and should be offensive to anyone who subscribes to Christianity or any other major religion. The U.S. government is not sacred. The lives lost on 9/11 were of course of infinite worth. But to single out a spot of blowback against U.S. wars—a spot that was jumped upon to launch ever more wars and the expansion of the U.S. government—and call it “hallowed ground” evokes religious imagery and feeling in a potentially blasphemous way. But in America, while Muslims pray in fear and even Christians, the majority, are harassed about their faith—where distinct minorities like fundamentalist Mormons and Branch Davidians are deprived of their families or even their right to live—worship of the U.S. government is the most protected “religious” freedom. Indeed, this is why we’re supposed to be completely enraged when foreigners burn the American flag, and yet not even bothered when American interrogators desecrate the Quran as they are conducting “enhanced interrogation techniques” against U.S. captives. It is why any disrespect of the U.S. Armed Forces is sacrilege in America, even as almost no Americans are aware that U.S. marines—the “best and the brightest”—spray-painted their motto “Semper Fi” onto the walls of the 4,000-year-old Ziggurat of Ur after they “liberated” the ancient Sumerian city, the Cradle of Civilization itself, as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Religion might be part of the particular motivation of every major side in the wars and terrorism of today, but it is the secular religion of collectivism, the civic religion of statism, that is most philosophically responsible for all this violence, and that has allowed people to reject their own religious teachings not to kill the innocent for what they have convinced themselves is the pursuit of the greater good. Utilitarianism and materialism and the worship of the worldly, not the spiritual, are the main problem here.

Religious freedom is under attack. Property rights are a thing of the past. A baseline of civility is absent in the way so many Americans have continued to respond to the terrorist attacks nine years ago. And worst of all, the U.S. government has continued its orgy of mass killing—in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and into Pakistan and who knows where next—demonstrating that the most important lessons of 9/11 have yet to be learned.

UPDATE: The Florida pastor has reportedly canceled the book burning. Now if only we could cancel U.S. wars, which do far more to inflame anti-American sentiment and violence.

In more bad news for Climate change alarmists, a new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience says that ice loss is much lower than predicted by the latest United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report.

Estimates of the rate of ice loss from Greenland and West Antarctica, one of the most worrying questions in the global warming debate, should be halved, according to Dutch and US scientists.

The study also directs further consideration to root causes far predating man’s burning of fossil fuels:

Glaciers that were kilometers (miles) thick smothered Antarctica and most of the northern hemisphere for tens of thousands of years, compressing the elastic crust beneath it with their titanic weight. When the glaciers started to retreat around 20,000 years ago, the crust started to rebound, and is still doing so.

May we now have a reconsideration of cap-and-trade, government funding of “green” initiatives, and other headlong commitments of our own and others’ limited resources—and the future of millions of less-advantaged individuals? Anyone for the separation of Science and State?

It’s not news that “Global warming” has been morphed into “Climate change” as global temperatures have failed to rise as predicted by climate alarmists of the 1990s. But the quoted reaction by the head of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to the most recent investigation into the IPCC’s methodology is positively Orwellian:

Science has confirmed that climate change is real.

Has any scientist, on any part of the climate change debate’s spectrum, ever claimed that climate does not change over time?

IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri also stressed that neither this recently-concluded investigation by the InterAcademy Council, nor the multiple recent “Climategate” investigations, has questioned the IPCC’s conclusion of climate change’s “likely human cause.” (None of the investigations, in fact, even included the question within the purview of their investigations.)

Back when I took science—admittedly a long time ago—something characterized as “likely” was called a hypothesis, with conclusions reserved for facts that had been proven through the scientific method.

Today, apparently, post-normal science provides for conclusions to be based on “tricks” ranging from mixing data series to omitting dissent.

The IPCC itself commissioned the InterAcademy’s investigation, whose scope was limited to looking into errors and omissions of the IPCC’s 2007 report. Among the investigation’s gentle rebukes:

A particular problem in the 2007 report was that it didn’t consistently reflect uncertainty in some aspects of climate change, the investigation found.

The writers of the IPCC report instead chose to include unfounded claims such as that the Himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035 and that the output of rain-fed agriculture in Africa will be halved by 2020.

An earlier investigation also revealed that the IPCC report’s authors changed the report’s conclusions regarding the disputed hockey stick graph from one that had been sent to the report’s external reviewers to one that favored the graph’s creators.

And so, yet another “independent” investigation leaves science out of its consideration and leaves those foisting their propaganda in place of hard facts unscathed and free to carry on: Phil Jones remains at the Climate Research Unit; Michael Mann at Penn State; and Rajendra Pachauri at the IPCC. Annual U.N. climate conferences—the next slated for December in Cancun, Mexico—will no doubt continue to play off climate alarmists’ pet theories, and the next IPCC report—slated for 2014—will most likely be brought to us by the very same authors as 2007’s. No change here.

The New York Times finally gets what we on the “free market “fringe” have said from the beginning (under Bush and now under Obama):

Housing subsidies, easy credit, bribing banks to refinance those “under water,” and–even worse–extending “first-time homeowner” programs to the nth degree just doesn’t work! Artificial stimulation of housing caused this bubble. “The hair of the dog that bit you” isn’t going to treat your disease. Keeping the addict “hooked” doesn’t work either.

This is all keeping with the Austrian interpretation of the business cycle: the government encouraged people to misallocate their resources, on a massive scale, by investing in housing. When banks failed, the government “rode to the rescue” of those “Too Big to Fail.” Don’t think that it was only Big Business: everyone, even those who can afford their mortgage, feels entitled to an increase in their asset value. If their house is “under water” (worth less than than what they owe), then screw banks, screw the government–I want a bailout too!

Policymakers in Washington, D.C. have learned NOTHING. “Moral hazard”? Regime uncertainty? We don’t know business, they say, but we can count votes and our policy makes perfect political sense:

First, promise current home owners they will not fail. They will not even lose money. Their assets must retain their value. That is the American Dream, right? All up, no down?

Second, we “keep on keeping on” by making housing affordable for first-time home buyers.

Even those who know current policies are self-destructive cannot say it. Politicians must always promise something for everyone–except savers, punished for their thrift as the Fed drives rates down near zero.

So far, the Republicans satisfy themselves with letting the Democratics implode this election cycle. But they cannot crow too loudly because they were part of the bipartisan circus that brought us Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac guarantees (and now taxpayers are on the hook for $15 trillion of mortgage debt). No one has gotten the free market gospel or the immorality of government subsidies: the GOP has yet to say “we must face the consequences of promising a ‘free lunch.'” “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”

Even the lobbying arm of home builders suggest that the best policy is “doing nothing” — and yet that is the hardest thing for politicians to do. The Times ends with this reflection:“Some members of the National Association of Home Builders say a new credit of $25,000 would raise demand but their chances of getting this through Congress are nonexistent.

“Our members are saying that if we can’t get a very large tax credit — one that really brings people off the bench — why use our political capital at all?” said David Crowe, the chief economist for the home builders.

That might give the Obama administration permission to take the risk of doing nothing.”

Democracy is on trial, not free markets. The question is:

Can elected officials act responsibly or do political incentives and special interests clash with economic reality? So far, democratic illusion is winning out over economic reality. Dear politicians: “doing nothing” sounds better all the time. The Times has given you cover–now do the right thing.

As if that is going to happen.

The failed and bankrupt Los Angeles public school district is spending money like there’s no tomorrow—which for the students it’s failing to educate is unfortunately true.

The school district, currently running a $640 million deficit, is spending $578 million—about $140,000 per student—on a new, 24-acre school in the middle of Los Angeles. At the same time, the district has laid off 3,000 teachers over the past 2 years, and has the second lowest graduation rate in the country, at 40.6%.

L.A. claims to spend about $10,000 per student. But, as this article reveals, its actual per-pupil budget is $29,790, in stark contrast to private school spending:

Based on federal data, we estimate the typical private school in the L.A. area spends just under $8,500 to educate each student, and many far less. L.A. Unified, at almost $30,000, spends over 250 percent more.

The new $578 million Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools complex offers an auditorium with a starry ceiling; murals of Robert F. Kennedy and other public art totaling $1.3 million; a marble slab engraved with quotes by Cesar Chavez, Maya Angelou, and Ted Kennedy; and $54,000 talking benches that play a three-hour audio of the site’s history (it is built on the site of the old Ambassador Hotel, where Robert Kennedy was shot, and the school district had to fight Donald Trump to buy it).

The school district also spent $232 million for its new Visual and Performing Arts High school, and $377 million for a school originally budgeted at $110 million and that now ranks in the bottom third for students with similar demographics on state tests.

Voters need to quit enabling these profligate officials and start voting No on every school bond issue that makes it to the ballot. Dance studios with cushioned maple floors and kitchens with restaurant-quality pizza ovens don’t provide quality educations, and neither do unaccountable public school districts.

It must be a condition of employment that a journalist who writes about the current recession include in his article the statement, “consumption makes up more than two-thirds of the economy” or “consumption spending accounts for 70 percent of GDP.” This seemingly simple, factual statement, however, is nearly always intended to carry some explanatory weight, and on occasion the writer spells out this explanation by adding a statement such as, “unless consumers begin to open their wallets and spend more, recovery from the current recession will be impossible.”

At first glance, this journalistic commonplace appears to make sense. Anyone can understand that, say, a store at the mall will not hire additional employees unless its sales increase enough to justify the additional expense. Hence, would-be employees will remain unemployed; they will purchase fewer consumption goods than they would have purchased if they had jobs; and therefore the stores will not hire more workers; and so forth. The circle of a theory of income and employment seems to be closed, and thus an explanation provided for the lingering recession: consumers are not spending enough.

One does not need a Ph.D. in economics, however, to discover that something must be wrong with this way of thinking about prosperity and recession. Checking the national economic accounts produced by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (Table l.l.6), one finds, for example, that the most recent quarterly peak in real personal consumption expenditure occurred in the fourth quarter of 2007. This spending ($9,244 billion at an annual rate) equaled 69.2 percent of contemporary GDP ($13,364 billion at an annual rate)—where the data are expressed in dollars of 2005 purchasing power. Real GDP did not fall significantly until the third quarter of 2008. When it reached its trough in the second quarter of 2009, it had fallen to $12,810 billion, down about 4 percent. At that time, real personal consumption spending was $9,117 billion, down only 1.4 percent, and equal to about 71 percent of GDP. Thus, as usual over the course of a boom and bust, consumption spending varied proportionately less than GDP as a whole.

As every student of the business cycle learns early on, the most variable part of aggregate expenditure is private investment. When real gross private domestic investment peaked, in the first quarter of 2006, it was $2,265 billion, or 17.5 percent of GDP. When it hit bottom in the second quarter of 2009, it had fallen by 36 percent to $1,453 billion, or 11.3 percent of GDP. (Deducting investment expenditures aimed at compensating for depreciation of the private capital stock [Table 1.7.6], we find that real net private investment – the part that contributes to economic growth—in the most recent quarter was only one-third as great as it was at its peak in early 2006.) The ups and downs of the business cycle are obviously driven not by consumption spending, but by investment spending.

In the second quarter of 2010, real personal consumption was $9,270 billion, or slightly above its previous peak, at an all-time high. If stimulating consumption spending were the key to an economic revival, we would have achieved one already. And if we accepted real GDP as an adequate index of the economy’s health, we might affirm that conclusion, given that in the most recent quarter, real GDP was only 1.3 percent below its previous peak. With the official unemployment rate stuck near 10 percent and millions of people having left the labor force or having settled for part-time work, however, that conclusion is hard to swallow.

The vulgar Keynesian focus on consumption unfortunately tempts politicians to approve “stimulus” measures aimed at pumping up this part of total spending—measures such as long extensions of unemployment insurance benefits, aid to state and local governments to help them avoid personnel reductions, and increases in the salaries of federal employees. Some economists even go so far as to single out such measures for special praise on the grounds that because such payments are most likely to give rise to consumption spending in the near term, they have the greatest “multiplier effect.”

Such arguments, however, fail to grasp the true nature of the boom-bust cycle, especially the central role of investment spending in driving it—and, more important, in driving the long-run growth of real output that translates into a rising standard of living for the general public. Politicians, if they truly wish to promote genuine, sustainable recovery and long-run economic growth, need to focus on actions that will contribute to a revival of private investment, not on pumping up consumption. In the most recent quarter, real gross private domestic investment was running at an annual rate more than 20 percent below its previous peak and, as noted, real net private investment was fully two-thirds below its previous peak.

To bring about this essential revival of investment, the government needs to put an end to actions that threaten investors’ returns and create uncertainty that paralyzes their undertaking of new long-term projects. Gigantic measures such as the recently enacted health-care legislation and the financial-reform law, which entail hundreds of new regulations whose specific content, enforcement, and costs are impossible to forecast with confidence, contribute to “regime uncertainty” and thereby encourage investors to hold large cash balances or to park their funds in short-term, low-yield, less risky securities. Such investments cannot support genuine recovery and sustained long-run growth.

In sum, our crying need at present is for a robust revival of private long-term investment. Consumption-oriented government “stimulus” programs, at best, only ensure a protracted period of economic stagnation.

In the debate triggered by Aneel Karnani’s essay on corporate social responsibility published in the Wall Street Journal (Aug. 23)—see the letters to the editor published on Aug. 30—a critical point was overlooked.

If, as the late Milton Friedman taught, the sole objective of business is maximize profits, then the managers of those private enterprises would not be able to substitute their own preferences for those of their shareholders as to what charities and other social objectives to promote. Why should corporate CEOs be free to donate some of their owners’ profits to, say, the local symphony orchestra, rather than to more pressing social needs?

Confining the objective of business to profit-maximization affords shareholders the freedom to spend those profits as they see fit, be it on themselves or on their favorite cause. That is why no one should invest in a corporation that claims to be “socially responsible”.

As businessmen, including many who supported Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, continue to go public with complaints about regime uncertainty and its discouraging effect on the economy’s recovery, some observers are speculating that the tycoons’ animus is driven at least in part by their sense of betrayal: they had recognized Obama as a member in good standing of their class (aptly known as the ruling class) and supported his rise to power, yet his policies have brought about conditions in which it is impossible for them to prosper.

As Andrew Ross Sorkin has written recently in the New York Times:

Mr. Obama was viewed as a member of the elite, an Ivy League graduate (Columbia, class of ’83 . . .), president of The Harvard Law Review—he was supposed to be just like them. President Obama was the “intelligent” choice, the same way they felt about themselves. They say that they knew he would seek higher taxes and tighter regulation; that was O.K. What they say they did not realize was that they were going to be painted as villains.

So, once again, Barack Obama’s presidency reflects that of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the well-heeled playboy-politician who ascended the political ladder while living very comfortably, owing to his forebears’ accumulation of wealth, and circulated with complete ease among the “best people.” (Note: In FDR’s case, the credentials were the reverse of Obama’s—Harvard College, graduated 1904; Columbia Law School, attended but dropped out in 1907, having already passed the New York State bar exam.) After Roosevelt became president, however, especially from 1935 onward, he was reviled as a “traitor to his class” because of his attacks on “economic royalists,” whom he blamed for the Depression and for the New Deal’s failure to restore prosperity. Perhaps before long the contemporary moguls will revive the American Liberty League.

Too many Americans think of Barack Obama as somehow alien to the established politico-economic order. Many accuse him of all sorts of affiliations and loyalties at odds with the preservation of that order. In my view, however, he is as American as apple pie—as American as Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was not born in a sharecropper’s shack; he did not walk six miles barefooted through the snow, uphill both ways, to attend school; he has always been a successful player in the upper reaches of the participatory fascist system that thickheaded Americans revere as “democracy in action” in the “land of the free.”

So, yes, the billionaires have a perfect right to feel betrayed. They accepted Obama as one of their own; they supported his rise to power, from his student days onward; and they bankrolled his election as president. But, now, after directing hundreds of billions of dollars toward politically well-connected firms in the course of the various bailouts and Fed effusions his administration has inherited, sponsored, or overseen, he has decided to make the Wall Street movers and shakers his whipping boys.

Before concluding that these cry babies are only getting what they richly (pun intended) deserve, we might well pause to consider that the Obama administration’s policies are, in fact—just as big-league investors and businessmen are increasingly saying publicly—creating regime uncertainty that seriously impedes the recovery of private investment, which must be an essential part, indeed, the very beating heart of any genuine restoration of prosperity.