Obama and the Nobel: Right Man, Wrong Prize

by Doug O'Brien

The Norwegian Nobel Committee wanted to let everyone know that they really like Barack Obama. They approve of his political views and they want him to remake the world according to his vision.  Okay, we get it.  The Norwegians, one of the most homogeneous societies in the world, whose sole significant imprint on the world stage is the annual awarding of this increasingly worthless prize, arrogantly assume the role of moral arbiters of United States politics.  Thanks.  Appreciate it. 

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It is blatantly absurd to award the Nobel Peace Prize to a nine-month president with absolutely no foreign policy achievement of note.  Especially when there are so many other fields where the Academy could justify lavishing glory, (and money–one wonders what POTUS will do with the cash?) on their secular savior. 

 President Obama has written two highly acclaimed (by the left) books.  Dreams from My Father is his accounting of his unique life story and his journey to understand his roots and his father’s abandonment of him and his mother.  It was called, “the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician,” by fawning sychophant Joe Klein.

 His second book, The Audacity of Hope (the first campaign flier published by Crown) was his soaring vision of a nation and world guided by the kind of social justice that only a community organizer can envision.  No less a literary critic than Gary Hart called Obama a, “figure who possesses perseverance and writing skills that have flashes of grandeur.”  The book occupied the New York Times Bestseller List for thirty weeks and won a Grammy to boot.

Almost any writer would kill to have sold as many volumes and have his or her books become so influential.  Surely the Nobel Prize for literature would have been much more justifiable.

Come to think of it, one could justify almost any other Nobel Prize for Obama other than the Peace Prize.  As has been exhaustively noted by questioners around the globe, the prizes are awareded for acheivement, not for good intentions, not for speeches or sound bites or just not being the guy you replaced.  It could be rationalized if Obama had spent decades striving for peace and had kept coming up short, to give him the prize for persistency.  Kind of like the Irving Thalberg Award for sticking around long enough.  In other words, Jimmy Carter’s Nobel Prize.

How about the prize for medicine?  Come up with some new discovery of how this gene or this virus works and help some people live a better life?  Pfooey!  Completely restructure the way 300 million people get treatment, invade people’s lives to an unprecedented level, decide what care is government-sanctioned and what isn’t, and in the process undermine the best care in the world, and you can really lay claim to having an impact on medicine.  Even without a bill passed yet, there is something there to hang your hat on.

But without a doubt, the prize to which Obama can most reasonably lay claim is that for economics, awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.  His nearly one-trillion dollar stimulus package has been a major achievement in the field.  It has been the most high-profile repudiation of Keynesian theory ever launched.  Of course, that wasn’t Obama’s intent, but so many scientific breakthroughs have come about while academics were trying to determine something else entirely.   The president conducted one of the highest-cost economics experiments in history, (with taxpayer money) to see if J. M. Keynes theory that massive government spending could essentially end economic recessions. 

The answer is, of course, no.  In an era where economic cycles, like all others are compressed, the consensus is that the stimulus has fallen far short of its desired impact.  Even if we grant that Congressional Democrats hijacked the initiative to pay off organized labor, environmentalists, and special-interest advocates of pet social projects, the package has not delivered.  Unemployment continues to creep upward, no matter how much dissembling the administration undertakes about “jobs saved,” and how many more would be out of work without the stimulus.

In a few short months, Professor Obama has achieved what many economists spend a life time trying.  He has provided concrete evidence to support an economic theory.  Fortunately for the future of the republic and the solvency of generations to come, the theory he has helped prove is that Keynes’ theory is garbage.  Government cannot borrow and spend its way to prosperity.   Obama’s experiment shows that government is an inefficient agent for redistribution of resources.  Its efforts are subject to political whims, its actions are slow and entail unforeseen costs and consequences that diminish, rather than increase positive economic activity. 

Now that is an achievement worthy of a Nobel Prize.  Come to think of it, a few more years of this and Obama will be a lock for the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty.


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Posted Oct 9th 2009 at 10:21 am in Culture, News, Obama, Politics, Uncategorized | 69 Comments