printSTATISM AND STUPIDITY ARE INTERCHANGEABLE. “Employers chopped 85,000 jobs last month, and difficulty finding work helped chase more than half a million people out of the job market,” reports the Hartford Courant.
To Obama, this is genuinely surprising. Didn’t he do everything possible to avert such a scenario? Didn’t he do everything right?
Sure, if you consider stupendous spending, the creation of faux industries—“the average cost of alleged new green jobs will be $135,000 per job”—and the taking over of failed ones.
With “the $780 billion stimulus plan,” the prez purports to have saved 1 million jobs, but by Kudlow’s calculations, each cost “roughly $200,000 per job.”
Mr. Midas touch has closed “down federal lands for oil and gas drilling,” opened up more EPA departments for capping-and-trading, is leading a government takeover of health care, and this is barely the beginning of BO’s transformation of “the government’s relation to the private economy.”
Because he is a dyed-in-the-wool statist, BO cannot conceive that by dolling out unemployment benefits, and state aid; launching government jobs programs—all of which necessitate the seizure of private wealth through taxing, borrowing, and printing paper—he is taking a wrecking ball to the job market, and the private economy.
Update (Jan. 9): I think BO is genuinely surprised. Contra Glenn Beck, I am not a conspiracy theorist. I believe in the banality of evil. BO believes in the Keynesian “remedied.” I think he’s scratching his head.
Here’s the mundane truth conspiracies obscure (from the post “On Conspiracy Theories”):
The premise for imputing conspiracies to garden variety government evils is this: government generally does what is good for us (NOT), so when it strays, we must look beyond the facts—for something far more sinister, as if government’s natural venality and quest for power were not enough to explain events. For example, why would one need to search for the “real reason” for an unjust, unscrupulous war, unless one believed government would never prosecute an unjust war. History belies that delusion.
Conspiracy is not congruent with a view of government as fundamentally antagonistic to the individual and to civil society, a position I hold.
Obama’s shocked! How do you suppose his economics czars feel?
BTW, it would be great, for the purpose of providing irony as entertainment, if we stopped calling them czars and started calling them swamis.
Swami, (Sw.) (Sanskrit: Sv?mi, IPA: [s?á?mi]) primarily a Hindu honorific for either males or females. It is derived from Sanskrit and means “He who knows and is the master of himself”.
Swami Orszag?
We need to break some more windows (to make more jobs)!
Not so fast on the last remark.
He knows darn well he is destroying the job market.
He has a visceral hatred for this country and folks who look like me. Anything that he does to destroy the economy is a good thing by him.
i agree that Obama has disdain for everything Classically Liberal and that he runs in the reparations crowd. But I also agree with Ilana that when Obama’s policies don’t produce what he wants, he simply doesn’t get it because he believes his ideology will actually create a better world. All day long, I’m around an academic crowd that thinks this way. If their ideology doesn’t produce the world they’re looking for, then the response is to work the ideology harder. It never occurs to them to question the premises of their ideology. In fact, because in their own mind their intentions are so noble, how dare anyone question their thinking. So I think we can predict like clockwork that Obama will work his ideology harder, which will mean seizing more control to produce the results he thinks he can produce. No doubt this can look like a conspiracy at times or some kind of design to destroy the good that free spontaneous human action creates. But the natural fruit of Statism is the destruction of that free spontaneous order. I like the descriptive phrase in this article, the “banality of evil.” Design, central planning, and the belief that one has the right ideology that provides him with the moral right to carry out such actions are all more frightening than any conspiracy one can come up with. One would wish that the neocons would get this, but if you’ve ever read Irving Kristol, don’t hold your breath.
I suspect much of Beck’s thought derives from his much ballyhooed research on the Cloward & Piven strategy (“the ultimate objective of this strategy (is) to wipe out poverty by establishing a guaranteed annual income… (via) the outright redistribution of income.””)
Whether it (the Obama jobs gambit) is done with a malevolent conspiratorial mindset or with a well-intentioned “wealth justice” goal, it doesn’t matter. Lazy ideas are bad ideas.
It’s all well and good to talk about “infrastructure” ad nauseaum to create jobs, but as any civil/structural engineer could tell you, the reality is these projects take years of planning first and don’t create permanent jobs in the long run.
Yet again we have a president who wades into topics of discussion well outside his areas of expertise (still not sure what area that is precisely, but he’s a ‘certified intellectual’ apparently. I assume that meant he’s a master of all trades). So we can add to the list: Cambridge cops of the stupidly acting persuasion, isolated man-made disaster extremists, tonsil-removing doctors, tea-bag wavers, and now Creator of jobs.
N.B.: I’m more or less on board with you as far as conspiracies are concerned. However, I’ve come to wonder if many of the well-intentioned social liberals of today have been indoctrinated into philosophical principles that have their genesis in thinkers who, perhaps, had more nefarious (i.e. anti-capitalist) intentions. At some point maybe we shouldn’t distinguish between those who are Marxist and statist in outlook as any different from anti-liberty and anti-freedom.
Obama has spent his whole life training himself as a social radical. I believe he does hate this country and is dead set on transforming it into a socialist, perhaps even a Marxist, workers paradise. Even beyond, he hasn’t done anything or even said anything to lead me to think he even knows the absolute basics of economic thought. One only has to look at that rogues gallery of cabinet members and Ivy league Maoist czars he picked to surround his throne.