Legacy media and other liberals are atwitter over the President's proposed "jobs plan," which he'll announce upon return from his latest vacation. They are hoping against hope that more centralized planning and fiddling by the federal government is the answer to both high unemployment and Obama's re-election chances.
Will the proposals be based on the premise ofgrowing the economy by encouraging production, employment, saving, and investment? Will the plan entail a return to a free market and a sound currency? Will it be about encouraging and rewarding profits-and hence employment-and reducing corporate and other taxes in order to free more capital for private, productive investment? Unfortunately, these are rhetorical questions.
The "plan" will be Washington-centric. Among other things, it will likely include creation of yet another large, new federal bureaucracy, dubbed an Infrastructure Bank, extensions of the payroll tax "holiday," extension of unemployment benefits, and "jobs training programs." Almost certainly, whatever tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks are included will be short-term in nature, gimmicky, and full of catches.
The solution to our employment predicament is not as complicated as politicians and elitists would have us believe. More convoluted, redistributionist, and interventionist plans on top of plans are not the answer and most of us know it instinctively. We're not Europe, at least not yet. As Mark Steyn writes in his excellent new book, After America, while citizens in other countries have assembled en masse recently to demand their governments do more for them,
America was the only nation in the developed world where millions of people took to the streets to tell the state: I can do just fine if you control-freak statists would shove your non-stimulating stimulus, your jobless jobs bill, and your multitrillion-dollar porkathons, and just stay the hell out of my life and my pocket.
But that message has not sunk in with this Administration. The President won't announce that he's thought about it and he's going to get out of our way. His ears are more attuned to calls for White-House-based "job creation," as if that's a legitimate, Constitutional role of the federal government. (And even it were, it does not have the capability.)
This Administration's track record is such that its "plans" end of making matters worse, often even more so for its staunchest supporters. During his radio program last evening (at the 81:00 minute mark), Mark Levin did a masterful job of explaining and articulating the root cause of our economic woes. Levin was responding to comments by Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-FL), wherein she attributed racism, among other things, to the high unemployment rate of African-American males. Levin countered that the problem is not racism, but statism and the resulting "big, bloated federal government" that's killing job creation for all Americans, no matter their race, ethnicity or creed. Levin said,
...it's not about racism...It's about capitalism and the need for the [free] market system to be tried again--to create wealth. They talk about spreading the wealth. Nothing spreads the wealth better than capitalism! It creates it. Individuals who participate in it benefit from it. They, may I say, profit from it...[Wilson] has convinced her constituency...that statism is not the problem, but liberty is the problem...that we should punish success; that we should steal profits; that [the government] should redistribute wealth...[Even] moderate statism is destructive of jobs...The answer in every community in this country, for every race...is one word: liberty! And there's only one economic system--one--that rewards liberty. And it's capitalism. As imperfect as it is, it is the most perfect economic system ever devised by man because it embraces the laws of economics. You cannot change the laws of economics, and when you try to you create poverty, economic dislocation and misery...
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