Writes Chris Condon:

I enjoyed your article on Obama and his advisors. Obama and most of our top leaders for many years have come from elite universities. That is part of their problem.

I went to Yale years ago. I observed that most of the people I met there had very quick minds and could absorb a great deal of information very quickly. They are very eloquent and talk very fast. They are very intimidating. After a while, however, the slick routine wears thin and one begins to realize that people coming out of these schools do have certain consistent flaws. For one thing, I notice that they have a very poor ability to ask the most fundamental questions or to get the big picture right. They are clever at manipulating facts and figures, not so good at seeing the big picture. Bill Clinton is a perfect example. I never met him, but I understand that he is a whiz at the details of government and the budget and the Congressional Budget Office and on and on and on. But for all his cleverness, Clinton has never understood that big government is a failed system and no amount of clever manipulation of money and regulations can ever make it work.

We see the same things in other fields as well. Medical doctors, for example, look brilliant when everything goes according to plan. But they have a very poor ability to recognize when an approach isn’t working and try something else. No matter how many times the initial approach fails, they keep pushing it.

The Best of Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.