Mr. Obama's Problem is Not a Failure to Communicate

In Marvin Olasky's excellent column in the March 13, 2010, issue of World Magazine, entitled "A Better Path," he writes:

Now the big question is whether President Obama will think that his problem is merely a failure to communicate. He should read the work of Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto Polar, who describes [in his book, The Other Path: the Economic Answer to Terrorism]the "tremendous conceptual error" of his country's leaders in words that should make the Obama administration tremble: "the assumption that, in an urban society swamped by migration, a ruler can know everything that is going on in the country and that a new social order can be built on this presumed knowledge."

As de Soto notes, "In such a society, with millions of people whose specialization makes them interdependent, with complex systems of communication between producers and buyers, creditors and debtors, employers and employees, with a constantly evolving technology, with competition and a daily flow of information from other countries, it is physically impossible to be familiar with and directly run even a small fraction of national activities."

Anyone without a high AQ—arrogance quotient—knows this.