America's 'Cargo Cult' Administration

A few years ago, Dan Jacoby wrote a piece criticizing President George W. Bush as trying to emulate Ronald Reagan, without any knowledge as to how Reagan operated. Jacoby referred to Bush as the "Cargo Cult President." This piece was retrofitted to our current president a few months ago as the summary of it was covered on the Rush Limbaugh show, and that particular comparison was much more accurate than the original Jacoby piece in 2004.

I believe it would be fair and accurate to extend this comparison to Obama's entire administration, as he and all of his advisers have virtually no real life experience in capitalism, and yet want all its goodies to magically appear if they simply go through the motions, all the while they demonize the very system that provides their coveted yet elusive prosperity.

If you are not familiar with the term 'cargo cult,' it refers to the primitive native peoples in the Pacific Islands and remote areas whose territories were pressed into service during WWII to service the U.S. Pacific Fleet, in addition to the Japanese Imperial Navy. These native people would watch as these foreigners (both Japanese and American troops) moved in, and subsequently build landing strips and control towers. Then as if by magic, planes would land on these strips full of food, water, supplies, gasoline, clothing, etc. Much of it would be distributed to the indigenous populations in addition to serving the war effort.

After the war ended, these foreigners left, and so did all of their goodies. Not wanting to interrupt this gravy train, the natives would ape the behaviors of those foreigners in hopes of making the magic planes arrive again. They would build bamboo 'control towers,' clear rudimentary, crude 'landing strips' out of the jungle, and talk into crude 'microphones', hoping that this behavior would entice the goodies to reappear, but in reality they had absolutely no understanding of the actual nature of where all these goodies came from. They had to assume it came from out of the sky, (presumably from the 'gods' ). These cults persisted in mimicking these behaviors for years and in some cases decades after the shipments ended.

Obama and his staff, cabinet and czars all are behaving in much the same way as these 'cargo cults' did, aping the soaring rhetoric of public figures of the past, such as FDR, Reagan, and Clinton, without having even a basic understanding of free market capitalism. Obama clearly seems unfazed to his profligate spending on social programs as to where all of these trillions of dollars are eventually going to come from: 'the gods', maybe.

Obama and his administration have no experience generating capital, creating jobs, meeting payrolls and all other tasks involved in creating wealth. Obama himself, along with his entire cabinet are products of academia, where Utopian philosophies and untried or impractical (but nice sounding) theories abound. None of them will ever work, nor ever have worked if implemented anywhere, but they continue to foist these foolish pie in the sky policies (unfunded) on our system, to be paid in real dollars, and not phony pie in the sky dollars, by our grand and great grand children.

These dreamers are simple fools who somehow have taken control of our country, and now are governing much like a 'cargo cult:' aping the behaviors (or more accurately, the rhetoric) of past leaders, without understanding the philosophy and capitalistic efforts behind them, and yet genuinely hoping for prosperity that will never come.

It didn't work for any of those 'cargo cults,' either, but some still persist waiting for the gods to shower them with cases of C-rations, just like the good old days.