Raising specters straight out of the Bleeding Heart Anthology of Horror Tales–like people actually delaying retirement to send their kids to college–a graying President Barack Obama tonight touted his latest tax-and-spend-our-way-back-to-prosperity scheme, which he repeatedly urged Congress to pass “right away” now that he’s back from Martha’s Vineyard.
It won’t work. It can’t work. It’s the opposite of what works, because tax-and-spend schemes take resources out of the market economy, where they could be used more efficiently, and filter them through the grasping hands of government and off to projects that aren’t subject to the accountability of the market-place. If you doubt that, please review the results of the President’s last “stimulus” plan, the one with all the shovel-ready jobs that weren’t as shovel-ready as he’d said.
Government cannot and does not create prosperity. People create prosperity, by producing things of value and exchanging them in the free market for things of greater value to them.
What government can do is what government should do: secure those people’s rights, specifically the right to property and the right to contract. And–even more important–stop violating those rights. In other words, end wealth-redistributing fiscal schemes and meddlesome regulations.
If it did that “right away”, the American horror story of The Leviathan that Strangled Prosperity would have a different ending.
UPDATE: My SamSphere colleagues weigh in on the scheme as well:
Obama’s “jobs” speech: second verse, same as the first
Congress Should Not Pass the American Jobs Act[;] it Should Just Pass
Live Tweeting Obama’s Jobs Speech: More Big[-]Government Boondoggles
