What the Harry Potter Series Can Teach Us About Our Own Governing

There is a lesson from the Harry Potter series worth examining - what happens to a society when the governing class ceases to govern effectively and worries more about protecting itself? Throughout the Harry Potter series, the brightest of the bright often are wrong about the coming threat of Lord Voldemort, and as the series progresses, we find that many are perfectly willing to ally themselves with the dark Lord to protect their own interest and power.

Looking at the United States today, we see a governing class that has failed miserably to govern and much of it due to pure ignorance. What passes for wisdom among the educated class would not pass a common sense test among those of us who live on Main Stream America. A group of New York Taxis cab drivers picked out randomly could designed an economic plan better than what we have seen out of Washington over the past few years, and it certainly wouldn’t be worse. As Bill Buckley once observed, he would have rather been governed by names picked out random in the phone book than by the Harvard faculty.

Look around and what do you see? The world economically is sitting on the eve of destruction, waiting for yet one more match to send the whole thin crashing down. For the past two years, we have seen Keynesian economics on steroids completely failed. We are told repeatedly, we were saved from a Great Depression but what we have done is simply delay a bigger crash without dealing with the causative effect of the original downturn. What the governing class has simply done was to slow complete economic recovery as the present recovery has been the weakest on record and now the recovery may be sputtering toward to a possible second recession. We have seen a recovery with very little job creation but worst, we have ignored the lesson of the past.

For years, the left has looked for reasons to discount the Reagan era, but the reality is that the Reagan recovery was superior to what Obama has accomplished, and it led to three decades of growth before government policies dealing with housing brought about the present economic disaster. Ask any liberals about the past decades and they still blame the Bush tax cuts for the budget deficits, never mind that what growth occurred over the past decade was due specifically to the Bush tax cuts. With the European social democracy on the brink of collapse, one would ask the question, are we repeating the European mistakes?

Another area is climate change science. The scientific scandal climategate in which a key scientific study conducted by leading climate specialists was shown to be methodically flawed, if not manipulated, has done little to change the governing class ideas of the climate change debate. Nor was this the only study in which we were methodically flawed or found manipulated data used, but the climategate also showed efforts by scientists to rewrite the climate history of the past thousand years. One climate specialist observed that the big weakness of climate science today is the failure to understand natural causes of climate changes and considering that for million of years, climate has changed because of natural events!

A smart governing class would not base energy policies on theories that are based on suspect science, but that is where we are today, an energy policy tied to a theory with serious flaws. Our failed governing class designed a climate policy that ends up enriching itself or to encourage more government control, for if you control energy policies, you can control people's travel habits and where they live. It is just another way to continue the use of failed government interventionist policies by inventing crisis to allow a rationale for bigger government.

One could go on about the ignorance that passes for wisdom and the most recent budget and debt ceiling demonstrates a ruling class far removed from realty as if there is no major crisis and one can keep doing business as usual. Forget the debt ceiling and possible default, many experts are more worried about a downgrade which could reverberate throughout the economy, including retirement plans of many Americans and send our fragile banking system into a second tailspin. Over the past week, we have seen the failure of our governing class. Again.