Barack Obama Cannot, Will Not and Does Not Want to 'Create Jobs'

     

As many thrills as he sends up Chris Matthews’ leg and despite his ability to walk on water, Barack Obama like all legislators cannot create jobs. All any politician can do is take resources from the private sector and allocate them according to his or her own fancy, often towards favored constituencies, at a prohibitive and wasteful cost.

Instead of letting individuals determine how best to allocate land, labor and capital based upon their own subjective values and aspirations, the government in its self-attributed divine wisdom believes it is morally right for it to squander other people’s money. Apparently, we are not ourselves capable of deciding how to dispense with our property, and deal with the consequences of such actions good or bad.

Then again, in our “social”ist democracy we feel it proper that government take care of our health and our retirement under the auspice of the “public good.” So what of a little more state paternalism? To that I say, the so-called public good is a public bad because when the collective supplants the individual, society fails. If people would rather have the government take care of such things then take care of them themselves, then the best we can hope for is that the government not monopolize such goods and services but allow for unobstructed private competition.

In any event, to ascribe the word “sector” to the limitless Unconstitutional and unnecessary public “businesses” is pure subterfuge. The plunder sector is the only accurate title for what the government does outside its strict Constitutional scope.

Any and all government “stimulus” retards growth because it removes current and future wealth from its producers and gives it to central planners who are not subject to the market but to voters, a significant part of which do not pay for the bread and circuses they demand, sadly trading their liberty for a false economic security that ends in the collapse of the welfare state while stripping real job creators of their property and the incentive to create. In case the moral argument and this brief economic one do not suit you, I suggest reading and sending to as many people you can Henry Hazlitt’s simple classic Economics in One Lesson, and specifically this chapter on public works, which explains the myriad economic fallacies pervading the nation with regard to public works.

Indeed, the only jobs that Barack Obama will “create,” will not be jobs in the traditional sense but make-work undertakings that the private sector, i.e. sovereign, voluntarily acting individuals would never put their money behind. And you can bet they will be union jobs, paying above market wages certainly making inefficient use of the land, labor and capital that real businesses would best make use of were not our whole economy being either hyper-regulated or socialized.

A politician cannot create jobs but only remove impediments to their creation, allowing for innovation, entrepreneurship and investments through creating a stable legal framework, applied equally and to all and steeped in maximal individual liberty, the sanctity of contracts and the protection of property rights.

The above addresses the “cannot” and “will not” parts of my title. But what of the last part? Would an American President intentionally sabotage an economic recovery?

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July 9, 2010