“I’m way too smart for Barack Obama, and I was way too smart for George W. Bush.” Those were the words of Houston businessman Ron Farmer in February of 2009. Keep the time when Farmer said what he said top of mind. There’s meaning to it.
Farmer’s joyfully cocky answer was in response to my downcast question: “Are we going to be OK?” This was once again February of 2009. The U.S. economy was (by U.S. standards) still in sad shape after President George W. Bush (egged on by Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, Henry Paulson and Congress) chose government intervention as his policy response to markets that he thought weren’t working right.
That a crisis followed the federal government’s substitution of its narrow knowledge for that of the marketplace was a statement of the obvious. What’s sad about it is that what happened in 2008 is still referred to as a “financial crisis.” It was nothing of the sort. Markets left alone can only create the knowledge and prices that are always and everywhere the drivers of growth. Only government intervention can cause a “crisis.”
The government intervention by Bush made Barack Obama’s election a near certainty. Love or hate John McCain, there was quite simply no way the electorate was going to reward the Party that had foisted so much ineptitude and pain on the economy with another presidential term. Which informed the question to Farmer despite McCain’s own struggles to grasp the genius of unfettered markets. With the political party most associated with “free markets” discredited, would we recover as those rhetorically skeptical of free markets were taking over?
Farmer’s response was truly uplifting. Though a libertarian through and through (I knew him through his support of the Cato Institute), Farmer wasn’t afraid of government. Again, he was (and is) too fast for political types. Extrapolate Farmer across a country populated with the most enterprising individuals on earth, and it was easier to see that better days were most certainly ahead. Fifteen years later, it’s evident that Farmer was right.
If “saying” and “doing” are antonyms (Holman Jenkins) in politics, then “Americans” and “progress” are synonyms. Moving forward is what Americans do. They can’t help but prosper.
This is important in consideration of the vote today. If the pundits are to be believed, there are no good choices in the vote for president.
Oh well, so what? As the great Ken Fisher explains it, we’re always in the Dark Ages in a policy sense. Fisher views the pessimism that emerges from Dark Ages style thinking optimistically. It’s the markets worrying for all of us. Fisher’s optimism is rooted in people like Farmer: Americans are too smart and too talented to be held down by politicians. Or as Warren Buffett has long reminded his many followers, Berkshire Hathaway buys stocks no matter the individual in the White House.
The confidence of Farmer, Fisher and Buffett is useful to remember no matter what happens on election day, and what follows. No matter the winner of the election, Americans will progress. And they’ll likely progress precisely because Americans are so love/hate binary in their view of both candidates.
The electorate is a market, and in our case it’s a big market. The market is split, and its split is rooted in each half of the total market saying the other candidate is awful. What a bullish signal. Two lousy people going up against the most brilliant people in the world’s most brilliant country? Better days ahead indeed.
