Obama’s Job Nadir — VOICES for REASON

In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, the economy is being strangled to death by government spending and controls. And yet its leading economic official, Wesley Mouch, prescribes more government intervention as the solution: “I need wider powers!” he yells repeatedly. Besides the yelling, President Barack Obama sounded an awful lot like Wesley Mouch at his recent “jobs summit,” which was intended to address our 10%+ unemployment.

Consider the context of the summit. The Bush and Obama administrations warned us that if we didn’t fall into line with their trillion-dollar bailouts and industry takeovers, we would be punished by unemployment over 10 percent. We fell into line. Unemployment is over 10 percent.

In the face of these developments, what is the response of Barack Obama? Does he consider that maybe his economic manipulation has made things worse? No — in the mold of Wesley Mouch, he holds a “jobs summit,” the purpose of which was to conjure up new government programs to alleviate unemployment. Why must the government act? “We cannot hang back and hope for the best,” Obama explained.

Hang back?! How does engaging in record levels of intervention constitute “hanging back”? It doesn’t — unless you have such contempt for economic freedom that any area in which people have it is a problem to be solved. For example, apparently the $800 billion “stimulus package” — money that must be forcibly taxed from some Americans to finance make-work for other Americans — wasn’t enough to “create jobs.” So we can’t just “hang back” with less than a trillion of people’s money; we need to take more to “create jobs.”

Only in the anticapitalist worldview that underlies government policy today does a lack of government intervention constitute “hanging back and hoping for the best” — the equivalent of a doctor refraining from performing necessary surgery because he is hoping for a miracle.

In reality, government intervention isn’t surgery that cures sickness, it is poison that causes sickness in what would otherwise be a free, productive market of individuals engaged in voluntary production and trade. (For a good account of the basics of the free market and government intervention, see the work of Henry Hazlitt, described here.) That government intervention is poison is the reason why the government’s “solutions” have only brought more problems. Thus, when we witness any kind of economic dislocation, from a housing boom and bust to 10% unemployment, the only summit to hold is one on how the government is using its coercive power to create the problem (for example, boosting unemployment by preventing prices and wages from falling). And the last conclusion that a rational summit would ever draw is to give either Wesley Mouch or Barack Obama wider powers.

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