One of the virulent maladies that afflicts the rag-tag remnants of the post-socialist left is extreme authoritarianism. This matters since nothing is more antithetical to core leftist principles than this. Worse, it's a cult-like form of authoritarianism, almost papist or monarchist in tone and scope, that seeks to elevate some mortal to diety status as religious as well as statist leader.

Barack Obama's speech on the financial crisis was a remarkable breakthrough. . .

Astounding! I wish I had written the speech. It is this kind of leadership and truth-telling that is the predicate for the shift in public opinion required to produce legislative change. A radical, appropriately nuanced, and deeply public-minded description of what has occurred, the speech was Roosevelt quality: the president as teacher-in-chief.

Rank rubbish. The president is not the teacher, or parent, or even leader. He heads one of three co-equal branches of government, expressly designed to blunt the predations of any aspiring diety. An effective president understands this and, with appropriate humility, cooperates with the other branches to do the people's work.

The speech also showed real understanding and subtlety in grasping how financial "innovation" had outrun regulation, as well as a historical sense of the abuses of the 1920s repeating themselves.

Rank rubbish. This is a very, very different world nearly 100 years later. Statist regulation was never adequate, even in the 1920s, and it is laughable to propose more of the same 100 years later when the world is so much more globalized and becoming more so at an ever faster rate.

This isn't a repeat, we've never been here before. The problems are novel. Failure to grasp the pressures and incentives of our world when proposing policies to cope with them makes it very unlikely that those policies will be helpful.

The one slightly disappointing part of the Obama speech was his call for $30 billion more in "stimulus." It's not nearly enough. He -- and we -- should stop even using the word "stimulus." To dig out of this mess, at a time when we already have large deficits, the federal government will need to fund a multi-year, public investment-led recovery program well into the hundreds of billions. It will need to be funded by restoring taxes on rich people. But this is a topic for another day.

The old dogma is quaint. As ever, facts are irrelevant, policies needn't be workable, rhetoric is everything.

None of the candidates for either party show any grasp of global issues, though that is precisely what is needed as we rocket into the 21st century. Politics always walks backwards into the future, arguing about historical irrelevancies while ignoring present opportunities and threats, but it is worse now than ever.

This makes the idea of a president as teacher-in-chief all the more ludicrous. The lessons they would teach would be antiquated. There's a place for that, but it's in universities where youngsters of all ages rework old puzzles to develop their talents, and prepare them to grapple with the unsolved puzzles of current reality. But, childhood should end at some point, surely long before running for president. Such a person, with a bit of wisdom, is unlikely to do so. Yet another reason why state power should be more limited. Those who choose that line of work are not the best and brightest, not the wisest and most mature. The position should be matched to their competence level, and that is invariably modest.