Mommas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Report on the Government’s Financial Reforms (Bob Higgs)

Bob Higgs comments on an unintentionally hilarious article from the AP:

Mommas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Report on the Government’s Financial Reforms

If you do, they will almost certainly disgrace your family by writing reports that can be interpreted in only two ways: (1) the reporter is a shill for the government, passing off government propaganda as news and analysis; and (2) the reporter is dreadfully incompetent and naïve with regard to government policies. Sad to say, many reporters display both sorts of failings simultaneously.

I am provoked to make these observations not merely by having been exposed to the mainstream news media for the past fifty years or so, but also, just this morning, by having blundered across an Associated Press article headlined “Obama Seeks to Overhaul Financial Rules.”

Of course, the headline can’t be accurate. Barack Obama knows nothing about finance, so he would not have the foggiest idea where to start in overhauling the existing financial rules. But let’s be generous. The story attributes to the emperor himself a project that is actually being carried out by his scheming lackeys in the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve System, and other parts of his vast bureaucracy. These faithful (and some, no doubt, not-so-faithful) servants are of course acting in the emperor’s name, whether or not he understands the details of their machinations.

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