A theme has developed in the comments following Beyond Slime about the slap-dash way that supposed climate experts conduct themselves. They make all the rookie mistakes that would lead to almost immediate failure for a business, yet they do not face the bracing winds of competition that would instruct them in professional responsibility. Worse, they are supported by and co dependent on that other bastion of amateurism - government.

nationalizing GM was totally discretionary. Cap and trade legislation — which would touch every corner of the economy — didn’t have to come up during a profound recession. Even fiscal stimulus was completely elective, and it certainly didn’t have to take the form of an up-for-grabs carnival of government spending.

Creating completely irresponsible, economically chilling regime uncertainty would appear to be the basic modus operandi of the Obama administration. When Geithner argues that the debate over health-care reform needs to be resolved quickly in order to establish certainty about the rules of the economic game, he pretty clearly implies that the Obama administration has indeed made a bad situation worse. Because, of course, health care reform didn’t have to come up. It should have been blazingly obvious that attempting to reshape one-sixth of the economy during a deep recession would only throw more sand into the already grinding gears of an already faltering economy. But the shock doctrine teaches never to let a crisis go to waste, and so the Obama administration attempted to push their most ardently desired policies through the window of crisis.

That this audacious strategy would hamper the ability of the economy to recover, as Geithner sees that it has, was totally predictable.

It was predicted. It isn't surprising. It is irresponsible. And it's the same sort of amateurish behavior that has gone on in the climate change industry. These kids don't seem to grasp that this isn't some video game where they play at managing some simulated civilization. Whatever their hopes and dreams may have been is irrelevant since they lack the competence and rationality to function at this level.

I would hope that society hears enough about this to learn a lesson: we can have our various points of view about how things ought to be but we really should all join together in insisting that we elect competent politicians. Nobody gets what they desire with bumblers in charge. I would also hope that part of that lesson is that no group can be given great power since none are competent to handle it. But it's complicated.

Here’s Tim Geithner, today:

“You cannot address those long-term deficits, you cannot put the government of the United States in a position that we can go back to living within our means, unless you repair the damage done to this economy and to its revenue base.”

Translation: we need to return to our bubble-era levels of income.

It’s worth remembering that income for America is the same thing as income for Americans: 81% of federal revenues come from income and payroll taxes.

Remember too that when you have a progressive tax system, especially when there are surcharges on people making seven-figure incomes, you also have a system where for any given level of national income, the greater the inequality, the greater the government’s tax revenues. And indeed federal revenues have been rising faster than median wages for decades now, thanks to the rich getting ever richer.

Given the government’s insatiable appetite for cash, it’s only natural that it would prefer to tax plutocrats, spending some of that money on poorer Americans, rather than move to a world where poorer Americans earn more (but still don’t pay that much in taxes), and the plutocrats earn less, depriving the national fisc of untold billions in revenue.

The government’s interests, then, are naturally aligned with those of the plutocrats — and when that happens, the chances of change naturally drop to zero.

What a mess. If you are tempted to claim that the current mess created by Obama is actually the fault of the plutocrats whose irrational exuberance, or whatever, made us vulnerable to bursting bubbles and financial crisis, then take a moment to think about how this is a result of the way the system is structured. Trying to tinker with parts of the system without seeing how such tinkering must fail is simple incompetence. If you truly think that the current system needs to be changed then you have to do a competent job of it, and that's a far, far larger task than the amateurish tinkering that Obama has been doing.

I suspect that the current administration isn't as dumb as it seems. They are just doing some looting. They are the vandals who have sacked a city state and don't care that collapse may follow since they will be gone by then. It will be someone else's problem to clean up the mess. The vandals will be fat, drunk and happy elsewhere by then.