IX: Obama’s Triumph of the Will: The 2008 Primaries 327Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New Haven CN: Yale University Press, 2008). As Art Laffer once
remarked, “You want to prove that Milton Friedman is a fascist? It’s easy – quote him.”
DON’T NOODGE ME, BRO’
The cynical gambit here is that Obama represents a third way capable of transcending the New
Deal and monetarist clash, and that this third way is not the same as the deeply flawed third way
that had been embraced by Bill Clinton in 1993 after his lecture from Greenspan on how bad things
really were – a lecture which submerged Clinton’s populist instincts under a toxic tide of Wall
Street pro-globalization ideology. The new buzz word is paternalistic libertarianism, meaning in
practice the Friedmanite anti-state, pro-monopoly, pro-cartel (“pro-market”) vision, but now
seasoned with a heady dose of coercion, which masquerades under the guise of a helpful “nudge.” If
we switch into Yiddish, we can see that both Thaler and Sunstein indeed qualify as full-fledged
nudges or noodges. In good Yiddish, nudzh or noodge works as substantive meaning one who
persistently pesters, annoys, or complains, a transitive verb meaning to annoy persistently or pester,
and even as an intransitive verb meaning to complain or carp persistently. The etymology goes back
to the Yiddish nudyen, to pester, bore, from Polish nudzi.’^176 Soon we are likely to hear calls to
Obama saying “Don’t noodge me, bro’” – because of the candidate’s propensity to complain and
blame his failures on the American people.
Obama’s economic policies can be classified as neo-liberal tending towards Schachtian – going
back to Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s first Finance Minister, a figure widely recognized by his
contemporaries as the chief German asset of the House of Morgan. What Thaler and Sunstein have
come up with is a not so clever pastiche based on the fake argument that Obama is “a
behavioralist—the term economists use to describe those who subscribe to the tenets of behavioral
economics, an increasingly popular discipline that seeks to marry the insights of psychology to the
rigor of economics.” As soon as we hear the term behaviorism applied to human affairs, it is time to
run for our lives. Behaviorism is the bankrupt, discredited, and sinister complex of crude and cruel
doctrines associated with the names of John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner. Skinner was the inventor
of the Skinner box, a torture chamber into which little white rats were placed so they could receive
alternating electrical shocks and pellets of food and candy in order to shape their behavior according
Skinner’s notion of operant behavior modification. Another example is Pavlov teaching dogs to
salivate when they hear a gong. These methods have long been applied to human affairs, with one
of the most infamous examples being Jeremy Bentham, one of the founders of modern British
intelligence and an architect of the worst Jacobin excesses of the French revolution. Bentham
designed a prison called the Panoptikon in which behaviorist methods were used to maximize the
exploitation of prisoners. Therefore, if you want to get a good image of yourself and your family
under a future Obama regime, imagine yourself in the position of that wretched little white rat in a
Skinner box, working and scampering and scurrying about hectically and desperately to avoid
excruciating electric shocks and to earn a little pellet of food. That is the core idea of behaviorist
economics, once the advertising copy has been stripped away. This is your future under the politics
of hope and change.
As a political matter, Obama’s acolytes are well aware that Clinton evolved well into New Deal
territory during her campaign, and these are the ideas that Obama is assigned to crush: as a recent
review notes, ‘Hillary Clinton, after initially equivocating, has emerged as the would-be heir to
FDR and John Maynard Keynes. In addition to imposing a ninety-day moratorium on foreclosures
and a five-year freeze on certain adjustable mortgage rates, she would have the federal government
buy up an undetermined number of troubled home loans, enabling lenders to convert them to more