I take an extremely dim view of attempts to psycho-analyze politicians. It’s tough enough opposing their policies. It’s a massive waste of time to sit back and try to figure out what motivates them.

Which brings me to the latest “conservative” stupidity. Dinesh D’Souza, who I used to like, has issued his latest ignorant screed trying to argue that Obama’s worldview comes from the father he barely knew. That’s he’s a secret Keynan marxist anti-colonialist who hates America. I’m not making this up. That’s pretty much what he says.

Ignore for the moment that D’Souza viewpoint is formed based on extremely selective reporting of various nontroversies about Obama. For example, he cites the speech — as many do — in which Obama said he believed in American exceptionalism just as Greeks and Brits believed in their exceptionalism. The Right Wing mouth foaming over this is not only weird, but stupid. They always elide the following lines where Obama vigorously trumpets American exceptionalism.

He also sites the nontroversy of Obama wanting NASA to forge international collaborations with Islamic countries, which turned out to be another overblown story. And then he turns to some selective quoting of Obama’s book to prove his point.

Even if you ignore the shitty reporting, the basic premise is garbage. Here’s Reason:

Sometimes things seem incredible because they are. Dreams From My Father is in fact a narrative of Obama’s non-relationship with his father. The whole point of the book is that the author’s paternal heritage is delivered in fragments during brief and usually troubled encounters. While Obama goes on about his father’s misfortunes — many of them clearly self-inflicted — in Kenya, there is no evidence for the claim that the elder Obama bequeathed his son a coherent or even a partial political philosophy.

The book does track a foggy course through Obama’s political growth, toward one inescapable goal: Obama’s formation came through and in reaction to his mother, a New Deal leftist whose social views were slightly more advanced than those of her cohort. There’s no need to go to Kenya for the kind of indoctrination into Frantz Fanon and socialism D’Souza describes: It was widely available at Occidental and Columbia. In fact, the book’s literary interest — and possibly its biggest political misdirection — rests in Obama’s putative skepticism about the leftish consensus of the sixties.

This sort of crap is damaging. Frum, on Newt Gingrich’s disgusting repetition of D’Souza’s crap:

Rush Limbaugh has been claiming for almost 2 years that President Obama is bent upon “redistribution” and “reparations.” Following D’Souza, Gingrich has now stepped up to suggest that this redistribution is motivated by anti-white racial revenge. If Obama wants to expand health coverage, tighten bank regulation, and create government make-work projects it’s not because he shares the same general outlook on the world as Walter Mondale or Ted Kennedy or so many other liberals, living and dead, all of them white and northern European. No, Obama wants to do what he does because he thinks like an African, and not just any kind of African but (in D’Souza’s phrase) “a Luo tribesman.”

It is to vindicate this African tribal dream that Obama wishes to raise the taxes of upper-income taxpayers and redistribute money away from these meritorious individuals. D’Souza contends that Obama is acting to vindicate his father’s supposed dream of overthrowing the global order and ending the global domination of the white race over other peoples.

Obama’s ideas are consistent with those espoused by a long line of leftists from McGovern down. What is the point in dragging in the dad he barely knew to assert that his worldview is based on some pan-African Marxism?

It’s to make him sound sinister. Because “liberal Democrat” or “New Deal democrat” or “Illinois liberal” don’t sound nearly as sinister. In short, it’s to play the racial angle.

It’s bad enough that the Left constantly accuses Obama’s critics of being racist. Do we have to hand them this kind of ammunition to make their accusations stick?

Michael Lewis has an amazing look at what went on in Europe’s newest failed state. It’s a tale of corruption, influence-peddling, tax-evasion and populace spoiled rotten by a welfare state. Reading it, I can’t see any hope for Greece’s future.

Reading it, I’m also once again grateful that I live in this country. Greece is not unusual, it’s the norm of human history. Contempt for the rule of law, business through corruption and bribery have defined more countries than anything else. As bad a politics gets in this country, the corruption and influence peddling is small potatoes compared to what hit Greece. The Democrats may be selling us out to Big Labor and the Republicans may no clue about fiscal responsibility. But at least their honest about it.

Probably the most important thing I learned in economics — and a keystone to my political views — is Bastiat’s what is seen and what is unseen.

In the department of economy, an act, a habit, an institution, a law, gives birth not only to an effect, but to a series of effects. Of these effects, the first only is immediate; it manifests itself simultaneously with its cause – it is seen. The others unfold in succession – they are not seen: it is well for us, if they are foreseen. Between a good and a bad economist this constitutes the whole difference – the one takes account of the visible effect; the other takes account both of the effects which are seen, and also of those which it is necessary to foresee. Now this difference is enormous, for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favourable, the ultimate consequences are fatal, and the converse. Hence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good, which will be followed by a great evil to come, while the true economist pursues a great good to come, – at the risk of a small present evil.

Two recent examples illustrate the point perfectly.

The first is that GM is going to emerge from bankruptcy and have a public offering. No doubt the Obama Administration will tout this as a triumph of their economic policy. What is seen is a big car company supposedly back on its feet. But Daniel Ikenson reminds us of what is unseen.

The intervention was akin to theft — from Ford, Honda, Toyota, the other automakers and taxpayers — and was highly damaging to crucial longstanding institutions in the United States, like property rights and the rule of law.

The costs of GM’s ”turnaround,” if it is to happen, will never be fully appreciated. The other auto companies were denied the spoils of competition. Had they been able to pick up the market share that the nationalized GM has maintained, then more resources would have flowed to the companies that are best at making the products that people want to buy. These are huge implicit costs–the costs that are not seen–that are happily swept under the rug by Obama administration officials.

We could have had a more dynamic car sector, thousands of more jobs and tens of billions less debt. That’s not to mention the damage done to pensions and 403b’s when the government illegally prioritized the unsecured debt of GM’s union pension obligations over the secured debt of GM’s lenders.

But what is truly unseen may be the long term damage in which the government can declare an industry to be sacred, violate the law and pour billions of dollar into it. It’s popular now among the Left because it involved car companies, the rust belt and unions. Will they be so sanguine when it’s an oil company? Or a wall street firm?

Another example is last week’s boasting by Obama of a battery company supposedly leading the way into an era of clean energy. Obama was touting ZBB, which is trying to create batteries to store energy produced by wind and solar, a process which has proven both difficult and costly.

That hasn’t stopped the Obama Administration, which has been investing willy-nilly in the commercial battery industry. And so last January, when the Department of Energy announced $2.3 billion in “clean energy manufacturing tax credits,” ZBB was one of 183 recipients—collecting $14 million.

We wonder who in government looked at ZBB’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Since going public in June of 2007, ZBB has been hemorrhaging money. The firm lost $4.9 million in fiscal 2008 and $5.5 million in fiscal 2009. In its most recent filing, in May, it said it had lost $6.9 million for the first nine months of its current fiscal year. It explained it had a “cumulative deficit” of $44.1 million and informed shareholders that it “anticipates incurring continuing losses.” It acknowledged that its ability to continue as a “going concern” was predicated on its ability to drum up additional funds.

Now it’s fine for private investors to put money into such an endeavor. But when the government does so, that tends to politicize. Money goes to companies that are connected and projects that are popular on capital hill, not necessarily companies that are well run and technology that is popular with the laws of physics. What is seen is a big company making batteries, what is unseen are the companies that could be making better ones.

An illustrative example here is HDTV. When HDTV was first being developed, companies went to the federal government demanding subsidies so they could compete with subsidized Japanese companies. Bush the First, who, unlike his son, was an actual conservative, refused. As a result, the companies went out and did it on their own. As you may have noticed, we got our HDTV eventually.

We can’t be fooled by high-minded press releases and boasts of government officials. We have to look deeper if we want to see the true impact of economic politicization. And the impact isn’t pretty.

Sigh. Remember when Democrats thought handing out subsidies to big business was a bad thing?