Will Obama Bring Real Economic "Change?"

That's the question I hear being bantered about on talk radio and in everyday life. The answer is yes... no... and maybe. I'll explain my cryptic answer in the rest of this post.

Yes, you will see "change" because Team Obama has a somewhat different ideology than Team Bush. And the incoming President is a lot more articulate, and intellectually curious than the outgoing one (although I will give him credit for commuting the sentences of the two Border Patrol agents, Copean and Ramos). However, Team Obama seems to have more faith in the power of government, versus the power of free markets.

(Note: Our current economic and financial challenges are BECAUSE of government intervening in the mortgage, money and stock markets. I'll explain why in a few paragraphs).

The answer to this question is also NO, because the Bush Administration had its hand firmly in allowing financial and economic stupidity to occur. The Federal Reserve lowered interest rates to rock-bottom levels, causing the biggest misallocation of capital to occur in the history of the world.

The government turned a blind eye towards severely relaxed lending standards (and in fact encouraged sub-prime and other lending to folks who couldn't afford the homes they were buying), and the SEC allowed Wall Street investment banks to become overly leveraged to the tune of 40-to-1 (obligations to actual capital ratio). It wasn't a matter of IF this house of financial cards would come tumbling down, but WHEN.

Team Obama seems intent on expanding government even more than the Bush Administration did - and that's saying quite a bit, because the past 8 years have seen the biggest explosion of federal spending and debt in American history. The new Adminstration has a utopian, Keynsian economic view that government should determine where capital and spending should occur.

Bush was never a free-market capitalist of limited-government conservative, just another chip off the ol' Rockefeller Republican, country-club block - and not a very bright one at that. If anything, Obama seems intent on accelerating the intrusion of government into the average American's life (i.e., higher taxes, federal spending, and "voluntary service" in the private and military sectors) and taking us more towards being a socialist nation, instead of the one we've known that's grown and flourished based on free-market capitalism.

I'm not saying the US has been perfect throughout its history, not by a long-shot. But I'll gladly take my chances having more opportunities in a free-market system and nation, than under the false security of socialist rule where my options are limited.

And MAYBE we'll have change for the better in America, meaning a country where government spending and regulation are limited; and fewer bureaucracies are around to regulate what foods and drugs we take, how and where we educate our children, and how much of our paycheck we can take home.

Although it may take awhile, maybe several years and maybe in another presidential Administration... until enough people realize that government has been the cause of our economic and financial problems, and not the solution. That's my dream and hope for 2009 and beyond.