Thursday, January 28, 2010

He's from the government and he's here to help us

National Review on Obama's speech:
“Let’s try common sense,” said the president. For Obama, that means that expanding Medicaid is the way to reduce the deficit. That increasing the price of energy is the way to create jobs. That further socializing medicine is the way to stay ahead of India. Nothing in his speech suggested that the government’s most important economic task might be to create the context of stability in which growth can occur. (Perhaps that thought would have interfered with the theme of “change.”) Beyond a pro forma sentence, nothing in the speech suggested that any positive economic trend could ever take hold without a direct assist from the federal government. Without its help, firms wouldn’t export or get credit. The proposal to forgive student-loan debt for people who go into “public service” typifies this administration’s attitude toward the economy: Producing wealth is less noble than rearranging it. On one of the country’s true economic challenges, runaway entitlement spending, Obama punted to a commission.
Read more here.

2 comments:

Lee said...

> Producing wealth is less noble than rearranging it.

That's the problem in a nutshell. Too many have taken the productiveness of the American economy for granted, little understanding the historically strange and too fragile circumstances that permit economic growth to occur at all.

The hopey-changey crowd is fantastic at indicting the status quo. No, the status quo will never be as nice as the imaginary world in their heads. It's only when you compare our (former) economic system to its real world alternatives that you can begin to appreciate it.

Obama gave an interview (what? Obama gave an interview?!) a couple of months ago in which he stated what a problem the deficit was. Hey bud, don't tell me. Tell Congress. Tell... yourself. His government swoops in like a deus ex machina to rescue failed companies like GM and Chrysler -- sorry, they needed (and still need) to go down. Capitalism is successful because failed enterprises are allowed to fail, and those resources employed in more productive endeavor.

You wouldn't think of sauntering into a programming shop, taking their biggest, most complex program, and changing code and parameters right and left, unless you wanted to break it. But that's what has been going on now for a long, long time (it didn't start with Obama, he's just perfecting it). I still haven't decided if its hubris or malice.

TomH said...

What about the lie where Obama said that he hasn't increased taxes? What about the cigarette and alcohol taxes, which are among the most regressive of taxes?