Obama's Worn Out Economic Ideas

Tom Sowell is watching the presidential politicians. If only the politicians would pay a little attention to Tom Sowell. Here is what Sowell writes about some of Senator Obama's favorite policies to talk about in his run for president thus far:

He thinks higher teacher pay is the answer to the abysmal failures of our education system, which is already far more expensive than the education provided in countries whose students have for decades consistently outperformed ours on international tests.

Senator Obama is for making college "affordable," as if he has never considered that government subsidies push up tuition, just as government subsidies push up agricultural prices, the price of medical care and other prices.

He is also for "alternative fuels," without the slightest thought about the prices of those fuels or the implications of those prices. All this is the old liberal agenda from years past, old wine in new bottles, a new face with old ideas that have been tried and failed repeatedly over the past generation.

This might be the best summary of the Senator's presidential policies:

Senator Obama is being hailed as the newest and freshest face on the American political scene. But he is advocating some of the oldest fallacies, just as if it was the 1960s again, or as if he has learned nothing and forgotten nothing since then.

We could also hope that voters would remember that all these policies have been tried before. So many of the policies politicians run on in elections, and so many chosen by legislatures, seem to be based on ideas that are simply foreign to economic reality.

But Sowell puts this better than I:

But politics is not about facts. It is about what politicians can get people to believe.