Palin's first Gaffe - i.e.: Reading is FUN-damental

Over the weekend Gov. Palin made her first public gaffe when speaking to a crowd of supporters in Colorado, speaking about the Fed government takeover of Freddie Mac & Fannie Mae, the two largest home-lending institutions in the country.

Palin said of the takeover; Freddie Mac & Fannie Mae had "gotten too big and too expensive for the taxpayers."

This is a nonsensical comment, considering that both Freddie Mac & Fannie Mae are private companies that have received $0 in taxpayer funding throughout the course of their existence. It demonstrates a complete lack of understanding as to what these companies are or what they do.

It is comments like these that worry me. Say what you will about Obama's, McCain's or Biden's credentials to be President, but at least each of them presumably has some kind of idea as to what the largest home-lending institutions in the country actually do.

Once again I find myself asking, why in God's name did Mitt Romney not get the nomination, or at least a place on the ticket?

This is what bothers me about American politics. We denigrate politicians who have excelled academically or in business, instead placing high emphasis on politicians whom we feel we can "identify with" and "relate to." This, in my opinion, is completely stupid, because by rejecting the intellectually accomplished candidates in favor of the more "relatable" candidates, all we are essentially doing is putting someone in office who will have less grasp of the complicated and substantive issues, and will inevitably end up relying on unelected and largely non-accountable advisers to propose, recommend and implement policy decisions.

To a certain degree, I blame this problem on America's fascination with cliche' spewing self-help books and talk-radio, two institutions that, to generalize, fetishize a sort-of cult of common sense.

By cult of common sense, I mean the idea that you can reduce societal and economic problems with a simple Occam's Razor analytical approach, or to put it more simply, reducing every argument to junior-high level syllogistic reasoning.

This kind of approach is well & good when you are dealing with simple dilemmas that have few variables, such as fiscal policy for a small city government, tax planning for a small business, etc. But when you try to extrapolate this line of reasoning to complex systems on a national or trans-national scale, you get nonsense. Take trade policy for example, or national anti-trust regulation, or national health-care regulation, or monetary policy. None of these problems can be solved or even approached using simplistic syllogisms or hokey common sense, despite what talk radio hacks want us to believe. They are each complex systems with countless variables, and taking action in one respect will cause various externalities which in turn will need to be dealt with. In other words, its a complicated world out there, and it frankly requires highly intelligent people with top-notch education & intellect to deal with it.

And what drives me insane is how so many Americans are quick to dismiss Mitt Romney's Harvard MBA, or Barrack Obama graduating in the top 25% of his class from Harvard Law School, etc. As a country we should expect that our politicians will have the capacity to understand the complex systems they seek to manage. By fetishizing overly-simplistic notions of common sense problem solving, and thinking we can apply simple maxims to complicated economic and comparative policies, we only end up electing politicians who instead of dealing with the problems facing our country, will have to turn to their advisers who actually understand these issues, and ask what they think.

Sarah Palin might be a nice woman, but lets be honest, if she doesn't even know what the hell Freddie Mac & Fannie Mae are, or what they do, how in the world do we expect her to make a rational decision on any economic issue without turning to one of her Harvard educated advisers, asking: "what should I do?"

Instead of turning up our noses up at intellectually accomplished candidates like Mitt "Mittens" Romney or Barack Obama, maybe we should consider that putting people like that into office, people who actually have a basic intellectual understanding of the policies they preach, might actually be a good idea. Until we do, we will be left with Presidents who don't understand their own policies, or how they work. Sort of like when a reporter asked Bush about the third round of tax cuts a few years ago at a press conference, and his reply was: "We got our tax-guy looking at that;" or something to that effect. There you have it... who cares if the President understands what the hell he is talking about, as long as he's got a "tax guy" taking care of it.