Larry Kudlow - Soap Box Jockey

Although there many TV commentators that I disagree with, Larry Kudlow is one of the few that cause me to change the channel when I encounter him. I don’t know why he even bothers having guest specialists and commentators on his CNBC show that disagree with him because he usually treats the show as his personal soap box, interrupts constantly, talks over everyone else, and is generally rude and trite. Rather than educated economic analysis, he is prone to trite summary judgments and is constantly applying juvenile labels such as “bubble head” or “Bailout nation” and is constantly shouting warnings that the US is headed towards socialism. He has never encountered a tax or government regulation that he supported and constantly cites unbridled capitalism as the cure for every economic situation. Larry "buy more stock" Kudlow doesn't seem to realize that Capitalism is a system in which capital is only one of the input factors and requires other inputs such as an educated labor force, an efficient infrastructure, etc. to work well. He responds viscerally to any suggestion that the stock market is overbought or that investors should stop buying stocks calling anyone with a message of caution a 'doom monger".

His economic analysis, when he even bothers to refer to some economic principle, is almost always wrong. He doesn't seem to recognize that the economic landscape has changed over the last 200 years from an economy based on agriculture and trade primarily in commodities and low value added manufactured goods. In 2007, he belittled anyone who suggested that we were heading towards a recession and up to mid 2008 denied that the US was in a recession. In June 2002, he actively argued for the US to invade Iraq in order to help the stock market arguing that “a lack of decisive follow-through in the global war on terrorism is the single biggest problem facing the stock market”. There are a number of justifications for putting the life of soldiers on the line but keeping the DOW index high is not one of them. He has without exception supported every Bush era economic policy without reservation. Mr. Kudlow’s economic philosophy is essentially classical economics which has consistently proven to be too limited of a theory to be of any value to planning economic policy. One of his favorite economists is Friedrich von Hayek who he cites often to support his contention that current government policy will lead the US to socialism. Mr. Kudlow is a conservative while Hayek, using contemporary terminology, is a libertarian and would have argued equally strongly against Mr. Kudlow’s economic prescriptions as he would against current Democratic policies. Ironically, Hayek says that regulation by the state is required in areas where the payment of a price is inefficient such as with most roads or where the cost of harmful effects of competition can not be confined to the owner such as air pollution. Kudlow would use Hayek to argue against Cap and Trade legislation while Mr. Kudlow’s hero Hayek would have said that such legislation was indeed the responsibility of the state.

I really don’t understand how Mr. Kudlow has been able to acquire such high level positions including the head economist for Bear Stearns (from which he was fired for substance abuse) and numerous high level government positions with only a BA in Economics. If you want unbiased business and economic analysis based on sound economic reasoning then I would suggest that you look elsewhere.