What is Elizabeth Warren good at? Has anyone figured that out yet?
There are a few areas where I believe she is excellent.
Rhetoric and Criticizing others. Warren is an attorney, a high school debate champion and a politician, her ability to find other people’s faults and make them public is spectacular. She can do it with clever, effective rhetoric and her presentation exudes credibility (whether warrantedor not). This has served her well.
Bankruptcy. Warren has made the study of bankruptcy her life’s work, she has written many books on the subject and she has collected facts on all of the ways that people fail in their financial lives. This is kind of like studying death, or studying drug addicts, almost a morbid pursuit of bad karma. Can you imagine surrounding yourself with such people and such ideas?
But that doesn’t necessarily mean that Warren has the ability to analyze these facts and provide reasonable coherent thoughts and solutions. She once concluded that the major influence of bankruptcy is that middle class families wanted to move into better school districts. While a correlation may exist (indeed obviously) that families reaching beyond their means to get to a better schools are more likely to be bankrupt, it is an obvious logical fallacy to believe that most bankruptcies are by families looking for better schools. (Just because ‘All A are B’ does not mean ‘All B are A’ – Go ahead, draw the Venn diagram, I know you are dying to…). Such incomplete thinking is brilliant when you are politician, but deadly when you are actually trying to solve problems.
But, per the title of this piece, let us talk about her incompetence.
Plans. Looking through her Wiki page and articles about her life (not exhaustively, I’m not a stalker, after all…), you will find that she has NEVER implemented a large scale plan of any kind. What this means to those of us who are in business, or the public sector who HAVE implemented plans and know what it takes, she has zero experience and her likelihood of completing any of her famous nationwide “plans” is slim to none.
If you have ever tried to shop a business plan or get a plan approved in the organization that you work with, you will find that your credibility and experience in implementing that plan is a key factor in the decision to move forward.
In fact, a venture capitalist evaluating a business startup plan, will spend 30 seconds reading the summary of the idea and then flip immediately to the management team section. They look for one criterium, which turns out to be the best predictor of success – Has anyone on the team ever been successful at this level before? Venture capitalists see thousands of ideas in an average year, many of them spectacular. But they don’t invest in ideas. They invest in people. Elizabeth Warren has never been successful at this level, she would not make the cut.
Economics. Anyone who has read my writings knows that I consider socialists to be the worst kind of incompetents. Warren’s “plans” include very large, very socialist ideas, e.g., medicare for all, heavily subsidized education, etc. Warren has no concept of the economic damage she would be causing by ripping apart the markets, no concept of the human reactions and damage to motivations, no idea of the unintended consequences (which are obvious to us who know economics). But of course she doesn’t. Because SHE HAS NEVER IMPLEMENTED A PLAN!
Conclusion. So Warren knows bankruptcy and rhetoric but she in not capable of implementing a plan and she doesn’t understand economics. What would America look like under the imprint of a President Warren?
Just like Barrack Obama used his expertise as a community organizer to turn America into an “us against them” society, if elected, Elizabeth Warren will use her own expertise to shape America.
In simple terms she will use rhetoric and the ability to criticize to tear up the institutions that work, but that she doesn’t understand (i.e. business, free enterprise, etc.). She will promote ideas that mirror the bankruptcy structures she has studied her whole life, i.e., American will transform into a bankruptcy model (and who knows what macabre form that will take, but it will put us in a bankruptcy mindset, and that cannot be good!).
Her grand socialist plans will ALL fail, and America’s economy will grind into a recession.
And she won’t know why.