It's now clear why Team Obama is following Rahm Emanuel's "shock doctrine" recommendation of not "letting a crisis go to waste." When you are trying to govern a center-right nation from the left, you need to grab whatever advantages fortune hands you and then move fast and hard to exploit them. But did Obama really win a mandate to borrow and spend taxpayer money like never before, rescue bad banks and then bailout financially-inept or even fraudulent homeowners? Rick Santelli doesn't think so.
Clearly, CNBC reporter Santelli tapped into something last week with his housing harangue from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. A YouTube video of Santelli has been downloaded more than half a million times, and commentary on the diatribe is burning up the blogosphere. He even made Meet the Press. Lots of pundits are comparing him to Howard "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" Beale, the crazed anchorman from the 1976 film "Network."
Actually, I prefer a different comparison. In 1937, there was a radio debate between Wendell Willkie and Franklin Roosevelt administration official Robert Jackson about the proper economic role of government. (The event and its fallout are wonderfully described in the outstanding book "The Forgotten Man" by Amity Shlaes.)
By all accounts, Willkie won easily by arguing that FDR's efforts at nationalizing the utilities industry, his dramatic tax increases, and his administration's push for prosecutions of businessmen had frozen the private sector with fear and prevented the country from returning to prosperity. The Saturday Evening Post would later dub Willkie "The Man Who Talked Back" against the New Deal and Big Government.
I would love to see a debate between Santelli and Obama spokesperson Robert Gibbs.
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FLASHBACK > NNB : NRO Talks to CNBC's Rick Santelli
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Rick Santelli: The Man Who Talked Back
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Instead of putting all these billions of dollar into the banks and the likes of AIG who obviously can't manage it; let just pay off the home mortgages in the US at an average of $200K per home. The stipulation is than that each home owner that recieved this would agree to put a minimum of $1000 per month back into the economy towards food, clothing, investing, buying automobiles, second homes for some, etc. At least than we know where the money went and we can invest back into our country. Believe it would take about twenty trillion and we would have that paid back in a much shorter time than we can expect from the government at this point. Just a thought and a different approach; put the money to use in the hands of those of us that are being asked to pay it back! Like the movie "Pay it Forward".
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