“If you must tell the truth, be sure to leave them laughing.” [look what happened to Jesus]

“There once was a man who did one thing right, and one thing wrong: he told a fool that he was a fool, and he forgot not to be standing next to a deep well at the time.”

The main reason politicans (outside of Northern Europe) don’t speak the truth is that in addition to helping their citizens, they must also serve their political base. And these objectives often conflict. Another reason is that often politicans don’t know economically successful policies. When all three of the above synch up, you get things like corn ethanol subsidies instead of the opposite: wind turbine (an existing technology) subsidies.

An honest American politican would identify a few million big salaried people that he must serve as “superdelegates” ahead of the American people. And when presented with a list of spending and employment alternatives, would mention where he has insufficient knowledge. The former would lose his parties nomination and the latter would be used to destroy him/her in a general election.

It is funny watching G.Soros collapse economies and spend the proceeds on progressive things like strengthening democracies and internet penetration. Likewise for W.Buffett donating his money to B.Gates’s excellent charitibale trust after making the money funding the Neoconservative Washington Post and buttressing sub-prime mortgage actors. I stopped wanting to be a hedge fund manager after learning of this and learning the best business blueprint is to stymie innovation by being a patent leech (ie. Buffett’s investment strategy would fund insulin but not a diabetes cure).

[ad:] the advantage of democracy is that if the rulers act in a manner obviously bad for most of their people, it is possible to get rid of the rulers.

Yo, but (1) in all but the rarest circumstances acts which are bad for the majority are easily made palatable using secrecy, obfuscation and false pretences; and (2) getting rid of the rules is only easy if you believe that the political stage actors are also the genuine writers and directors of the show.

Things are very good here in the USA.
We are very rich on average and we keep getting richer
Our problem of being fat is result of the affordability of food and so is a good problem to have. It is wonderful to live in a place even the poor can be fat.
Life expectancy is higher than it has ever been and will get higher.
Global warming so far have been net good. And we got solutions like biochar waiting in the wings should it get bad.
Our schools are real not significantly worse than schools anywhere
We won the war in Iraq. It only lasted 2 weeks. We can bring the troops home with little danger to US citizens.
There is no reason to fear the radical Islamists; compared to us they are increadible weak.
We humans can make plenty of energy. The long term price is down.
The crime rate is falling.

These are good times.

Bryan Caplan is an anarchist, and Robin Hanson believes people should (gasp!) bet on terrorism! I’m quite certain both would be considered completely bonkers by the voting public and media Paul Krugman is already pretty politicized, so I don’t think it would be very hard for him to appear sane.

I haven’t read Brad Delong’s blog much, so I can’t really comment. But I’d bet a lot that anyone who blogs regularly could easily be portrayed as nuts by the media by selectively reporting their posts.

a person who makes a public promise might sort of commit himself and so the bigger the promise maybe the harder a person will work towards those aims.

i can see a person who makes big promises being energizing to a group and more likely to accomplish great things compared to someone who is more realistic (possibly a sign of depression and hence lethargic leadership!) in a tribal environment, and maybe it is the case on a grander scale too. who were realists in rhetoric and who were unrealistic in rhetoric? i think of carter on one end and regan on the other as examples.

i suppose a happy medium might be to focus on what can be done with some energy and enthusiasm and reasonable optimism. “we probably can’t completely reverse x negative trend, but we’ve done great things in the past, and it’s not unreasonable that we can do great things regarding this problem too.”

Robin Hanson, Paul Krugman, Bryan Caplan, and Brad Delong all seem perfectly sane to me. However, if they were running for office I think at least two would be considered crazy.