time person of the year

The time magazine picked Ben Bernanke as its person of the year. This is the second win for him, as he and everyone else in the universe won in 2006 when “You” was the person of the year.

Such is the relevance of the awad.

Nonetheless, I think this is apt. In a year that saw a president use a $787 billion stimulus to turn a projected 9% unemployment rate into a 10% actual unemployment rate, who (besides Tim Geithner) better represents the breath-taking economic incompetence of today’s leadership in Washington?

Wrote Time: “He is not, in other words, a typical Beltway power broker. He’s shy. He doesn’t do the D.C. dinner-party circuit; he prefers to eat at home with his wife, who still makes him do the dishes and take out the trash. Then they do crosswords or read. Because Ben Bernanke is a nerd.”

Nerds!

That’s it.

Run the nerds out of Washington.

They are out of touch with reality. It is time to go William F. Buckley Jr. on them. Get the telephone book in Charleston, West Virginia, pick the first 200 names and put them in charge.

And then there is this: “Professor Bernanke of Princeton was a leading scholar of the Great Depression. He knew how the passive Fed of the 1930s helped create the calamity — through its stubborn refusal to expand the money supply and its tragic lack of imagination and experimentation.”

that is the opposite of what actually happened. Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt were interventionists who screwed up the economy so bad that it took a world war to end it.