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

by Andrew Mellon

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.

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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?

If one is to objectively look at the actions of this administration, one can come to no other conclusion.  Nauseating as it is, to review, this administration has abrogated private contracts, shifted private losses onto the public, socialized or de facto socialized major swaths of the economy, hyper-regulated the other parts of the economy, vilified private enterprises and individuals, in so doing added crushing taxes both direct and indirect in looting the Treasury and printing money, designated certain groups as being “protected” over others (liberty and justice for some apparently), attacked our judiciary and overall created an environment averse to all of the things that a politician interested in allowing for a prosperous and thriving economy would attempt to ensure.

Barack Obama is the anti-fertilizer to our rich economic soil.  And unlike FDR, terrible and tyrannical as he was with regard to the economy during his tenure, this President sees the evil in the world as good and the good as evil.  His only saving grace may be that his unparalleled hubris may like so many before him be his undoing.

But I digress.  If you were Barack Obama, why would you want to ensure that the economy remain crippled?  For one thing, this creates crisis.  Obama can blame the private sector for not creating jobs and argue that the public sector must lend an even bigger hand.  This will mean for him more hungry people to demand welfare or government jobs so anyone who wishes can be gainfully employed by the state and receive government union benefits.

Private industry failing also means lower tax revenues which this administration will argue means that taxes must be increased on the rich, further attacking wealth producers and creating larger and larger deficits.

All of this is essentially a Cloward-Piven type strategy.  What is unclear however is what Barack Obama’s end is, given the horrendous ends of all socialist states.

An objective observer knows that even if we had the most staunchly free market administration in office today, with a congenial Congress and Judiciary, the fiscal mess that is our welfare state would be difficult to clean up, and our private economic restructuring would be disruptive.  People generally simply do not seem to have the stomach for having all of their “benefits,” another misnomer if I have ever seen one, cut; they cannot make the connection that it is the “welfare” that itself is poison, as I have previously argued.  They also do not seem to realize the lesson from history that the private sector would return to prosperity relatively quickly as we did during the Recession of 1920 and all of our preceding ones were the government to get out of the way.

But if Barack Obama is trying to implode the system, and he is to succeed in doing so, how does he know that the people of this nation will not revolt?  Does he assume that people will simply demand a government that makes all of their decisions for them?  Perhaps he knows that this is a failing battle, but he realizes that if we manage to teeter for years on the edge, at least he will have accelerated the decline for fundamental transformation, swelling the public payroll and finances, sufficiently hobbling the private sector, weakening our morale and making people exponentially more reliant on government.  Even if he cannot push all the way to totalitarian collectivism, he can still get us close enough that is almost impossible to repeal massive statism.

Until I see any evidence to the contrary, after the nightmarish first year and a half of this administration, I will confidently argue that Obama and his cohorts are intentionally crushing our economy.  I will confidently argue that this administration cannot, will not and has no desire to create the conditions necessary for job creation.  All we can do in such times is be the biggest, baddest loyal opposition this nation has ever seen.


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Posted Jul 7th 2010 at 5:17 am in Congress, Economics, Featured Story, Federal Spending, News, Obama, Uncategorized, taxes | 545 Comments