Bozo Broder: Attack Iran to Boost Economy and Obama

If you don't think mainstream media is unhinged, you have to read today's column by Washington Post columnist David Broder.

Broder is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and writes a twice-a-week column for WaPo. Depauw University has called him:

one of the nation's most distinguished writers and television commentators. An American University survey of the Washington press corps concluded “David Broder's integrity and hard work have led him to be anointed the unofficial ‘chairman of the board' by national political writers.” US News & World Report called Broder "the unchallenged 'dean' of what many political reporters like to think is their 'priesthood.'

According to Jamisom Foser, Broder:

has been named "Best Newspaper Political Reporter" by the Washington Journalism Review, and ranked as "Washington's most highly regarded columnist" by editorial page editors and by members of Congress in a Washingtonian magazine survey.

So what is this high priest of DC journalists up to these days? Here he is his latest thinking in his own words:

With strong Republican support in Congress for challenging Iran's ambition to become a nuclear power, [Obama] can spend much of 2011 and 2012 orchestrating a showdown with the mullahs. This will help him politically because the opposition party will be urging him on. And as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war, the economy will improve.

How does he reach this conclusion? By a serious comments that indicate he is totally clueless about economics and history.

He writes:

Can Obama harness the forces that might spur new growth? This is the key question for the next two years.

What are those forces? Essentially, there are two. One is the power of the business cycle, the tidal force that throughout history has dictated when the economy expands and when it contracts.

Economists struggle to analyze this, but they almost inevitably conclude that it cannot be rushed and almost resists political command. As the saying goes, the market will go where it is going to go.

In this regard, Obama has no advantage over any other pol. Even in analyzing the tidal force correctly, he cannot control it.

Broder is simply clueless here about the business cycle. The BC is not some recurring "historical" force that can not be tamed. The BC is about central banks manipulating the money supply, which causes the boom bust cycle. (See Rothbard: The Mystery of Banking)

Far from a pol not being able to do anything about the BC, a pol, such as the president, can stop the damn thing by stopping Fed money printing.

Broder goes on:

What else might affect the economy? The answer is obvious, but its implications are frightening. War and peace influence the economy.

Look back at FDR and the Great Depression. What finally resolved that economic crisis? World War II.

Economists Robert Murphy and Robert Higgs have taken turns demolishing  this myth. Listen to Higgs important discussion of the matter, here.  During the recent Murphy-Wenzel Seminars in Boston, Murphy broke more ground about the truth behind supposed boom during World War 2. Murphy pointed out that the GDP numbers for the World War 2 period are useless because they weren't properly adjusted for inflation because of  price controls. Murphy stated that measured price inflation was much lower than it really should have been because of price controls, and this distorted GDP.

And, of course, as economist Joseph Stiglitz has pointed out, GDP doesn't measure "happiness."

It's impossible to quantitatively measure happiness the way Stiglitz would like to, but one can guess for many who get killed, or seriously injured,in a war that it is probably not their happiest moment.

Thus, GDP, during a war, may measure some bizarre positive for government statisticians and bozos like Broder, who buy into the BS, but war periods are not very happy times for those who die, are injured, and neither is it for the wives, parents, children and friends of those whose life has been twisted or ended by a bullet or some other material of death that curiously does get recorded into GDP as a positive.

If Broder thinks the stats that measure the value of a bullet as a positive, but fail to subtract the loss of life is the type of stat to be waved around as justification to start a war, what can one say other than the man is a total ass.