Batshit Crazies

It snowed and we were housebound and watched a movie.  “Moneyball” was one of the big surprises of this year, a movie that was supposed to be grade B and the makers merely hoped would break even.  Instead it became a blockbuster hit.  It’s about the management of baseball talent, the story of how Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland A’s managed to contract a bunch of cast-off players and remake the A’s after they had gone to the World Series the year before, but then all the big players had left for rich contracts with other teams. A’s had no money to replenish the team and Beane managed to hire a young kid who was a statistical/computer whiz who found the undervalued players.  And of course, if you know baseball history, the A’s made the playoffs and set a new major league record of 20 straight wins.  All the while Beane’s scouts and manager and the rest of the baseball public made fun of his changes.  But the punch line of the movie comes through the President of the Boston Red Sox who tried to hire Beane at the end of the season.  Roughly quoting, he said, “The first guy to break a barrier, to go through a wall, usually gets pretty bruised up.  That’s because the guy who comes in with a new idea threatens the guys in power, the guys who are used to running things their way, the guys who hold the reins.  And they go absolutely batshit crazy over the change.” 

How true in all things.  It was true of the Civil Rights movement when Southern governors and officials went batshit crazy over the marches and the marchers got pretty beat up.  True of Washington at Valley Forge, true of the guys who started Apple, true of Karl Benz and his auto-mobile. And most of all, I remember how true it was of Ronald Reagan and Arthur Laffer who came in with a novel idea that if you tax less, government gets more revenue.  That was utterly counter-intuitive for many political junkies and politicians.  Reagan’s own V-P went batshit crazy, calling it voodoo economics.  The media, the Europeans, the ruling Congressional Democrats, just about everyone went batshit crazy with criticism. But Lafferism worked.  And then Thatcher tried it also and it resurrected the Brits from “The British Disease” of welfare statism.  The Pacific rim countries paid note.  They had longed to become developed countries, and couldn’t decide if they wanted the Japanese model or the Chinese.  When they saw Lafferism they tried it and they became Asian Tigers of growth.

Sometimes the guy with the new ideas loses.  Benz just didn’t have enough resources to fight and wound up selling out to a guy who named the cars after his girlfriend, Mercedes.  Henry Ford had a vision of cheap cars but then when the country got richer, they wanted something upscale and bought GM.  And the Republicans put the Voodoo Economics Veep in after Reagan and gradually lost the movement to Washington political hacks.  But as the Red Sox Prez noted, “Next year any team that isn’t rebuilding their team with your model [Beane and the A’s], is going to ultimately lose.” And now the Northern Europeans as well as Asia are converting sheepishly to Laffer’s models. 

But here in America, the Batshit Crazies won an election with 52% in 2008 and 50.3% in 2012. They used all the old faithful ‘progressive’ tools—Class Warfare, Chickens in every special interest pot—and they are cocky as can be over 50.3%. Counter to the warnings of Britain and Scandinvians and Australians, they have doubled down on the Spend-Into-Prosperity model of government.  May I simply point out that it won’t work in the broader scheme of things.  Economics doesn’t lie.  We face horrid stagflation. What then? Default? Volcker 21% interest rates? At that point may I quote the words of Rev. Wright, “America’s chickens have come home to roost”.

The American people await new management.  The new manager will have to be expert at turnarounds in the political world, a communicator who can keep the people on his/her side, a bold artist of change back to the conservatism and free-market principles that made America the envy of the world.  We’ve come through the wall, been bruised a bit, but I have faith in American common sense.  Common sense will come out in spades when our team’s economy starts to look like the Royals and Expos.

In the end, Beane’s numbers guy encourages him to start attending the games and not distance himself from the team.  The romance of the game is still there.  So too, we need to take the fight to the Batshit Crazies.