GWB, MBA - The Harvard Crimson
It sounds to me like George W. Bush was a good enough student not to swallow what he was fed and regurtitate it back when the professor asked for it. It sounds to me like the professor has not learned the core lesson that most economists since Adam Smith have taught: beware the power and incompetence of the state in the management of economic affairs. Perhaps Bush (Yale, BA Economics) knew too much economics.
I'm afraid I've learned more about Baruch College than Bush.
Is there some dispute over whether FDR was a socialist?Thirty years ago, President Bush was my student at Harvard Business School. In my class, he called former president Franklin D. Roosevelt, Class of 1904, a “socialist” and spoke against Social Security, unemployment insurance, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and other New Deal innovations. He refused to understand that capitalism becomes corrupt without democratic civic values and ethical restraints.
Yoshi Tsurumi is a professor of international business at Baruch College. He earned his Doctor of Business Administration from Harvard in 1968, and he taught at Harvard Business School from 1972 to 1976.
It sounds to me like George W. Bush was a good enough student not to swallow what he was fed and regurtitate it back when the professor asked for it. It sounds to me like the professor has not learned the core lesson that most economists since Adam Smith have taught: beware the power and incompetence of the state in the management of economic affairs. Perhaps Bush (Yale, BA Economics) knew too much economics.
I'm afraid I've learned more about Baruch College than Bush.
posted by John B. Chilton at 5/15/2005 11:10:00 AM
3 Comments:
FDR was a staunch capitalist who borrowed or used socialist ideas. He did this to save capitalism from itself; without his efforts, capitalism itself, under unprecedented stress in the midst of the Great Depression was near collapse.
As for Bush - I'm amazed that his old professor could get a single coherent sentence out of him. It's certainly not been the case since.
I am amazed and impressed by the quality of Prof. Tsurumi's memory. I recently met a student of mine from eight years ago. She introduced herself and I had to admit that I couldn't remember her. I went back to my grade books and checked, but that told me little except that she had done a better in one of my classes than the other. I could not have reconstructed her opinions if called before Congress on a subpoena. One problem I have found is that I don't know which of my students will become important and so worth keeping good notes on on matters extraneous to their grades.
So you're celebrating Bush's ability to commit a couple of John Birch Society talking points to his coke-addled brain, and equating that with "intelligence"?
And even worse, you appear to also believe those same talking points.
If you define socialism as expanding the scope and scale of government (which isn't really the proper definition), then Bush is the biggest socialist to occupy the White House in a long, long time.
Check out this link for an illustration of your Chimp-master's understanding of free-market economics:
http://tinyurl.com/7t9qy
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