With so many lives in a tailspin right now, many people are looking to President Elect Obama and the Democrat Congress for help. Contrary to what Bill Clinton said in 1995, the era of big government is just beginning. FDR called his government programs relief. LBJ’s programs were the great society. Bush touted compassionate conservatism, and Obama is promising hope. These programs hold a common morally bankrupt premise that the government is capable of compassion.
Ronald Regan was famous for keeping a checkbook in his presidential desk. Whenever he read a particularly sad story, he would write a personal check to the afflicted party. Liberals derided Reagan’s charity because one person could not possibly cure all the ills of the US. They argued that he was just buying some solace from the guilt of not expanding government social programs. Of course Reagan’s personal compassion was minuscule next to the Obama plan, but it was more real.
In addition to there being no evidence that social programs like The New Deal or The Great Society ever helped their economies, people should also remember that FDR and LBJ never paid for any of their compassion. Like all government programs, they only shifted funds from one group to another. Stimulus programs can not create jobs, they only destroy wealth to concentrate it in the hands of favored industries. The net effect is, by necessity, less prosperity, since the government takes resources from prosperous sectors and transfers them to pet projects that usually could not survive without subsidies.
The benefit to politicians is not just the self satisfaction of appearing to help people. By concentrating wealth through government programs, they buy loyalty. Nobody can identify the jobs destroyed, but it is easy to ballyhoo the new ones created. Obama has pledged to create 3.5 million new eco-jobs, yet nobody questions the over 4 million free market jobs his program will likely destroy. Those 4 million lost jobs might or might not support Obama and his eco agenda, but the 3.5 million new eco-jobs most certainly do know whom to thank. Thus is the wasteful cycle of pork and legalized graft more commonly known as beltway politics.
If you have a job, you have many people to thank. You can thank yourself foremost; you are the one who gets up every morning and goes to work. You can also thank the owners of your company who pay you and provide a place for you to work. You can thank the USA for being a country of laws and freedom that has created more prosperity for the world than any other. Very few people, however, will ever wake up and thank the sitting president for their jobs.
If most people don’t thank their president for their jobs, why should the media credit a president with creating jobs? Presidents don’t place help wanted ads in the local paper, businesses do. When Obama says “yes we can,” he is hitching a free ride on the enterprise of others.
That is the moral problem with collectivist job creation programs. Despite the fact that no public works program has ever pulled an economy out of a recession, or even helped, politicians always try to stimulate a faltering economy. They take credit for job creation they had nothing to do with, and they claim compassion by spending other people’s money. Worst of all, their system of patronage hardens the government’s hold over every facet of people’s lives.
As usual, Reagan had it right. He downplayed his personal role in the greatest job creation cycle ever. Rather, he took credit for getting the government out of the way so the American system of free markets could work its magic. Do not let the avalanche of praise for the $850 billion stimulus bill deceive you into thanking Washington, because the real engine of prosperity is the private sector.