Catastrophe fatigue

Let's straighten out a misconception.

Nobody, not any person living or dead, is or ever has been smart enough to allocate all the resources in the economy to the places where they will do the most good to create jobs, prosperity, and successful re-election campaigns.

Nobody.

There is no magical combination of government carrots and sticks that will bring the economy to life.

If you don't believe this, observe our new president.

He's panicking.

Ever since he ordered his economic team to brief him every morning on the latest trends and numbers, he's been acting like President Bush did after he started reading the daily threat assessment with his morning coffee.

"Every day our economy gets sicker," the president wrote in the Washington Post today. "We have inherited an economic crisis as deep and dire as any since the days of the Great Depression," and "if nothing is done, this recession might linger for years."

It's a catastrophe, it's a crisis, it's an emergency. If we don't do what he says, and right now, "we may not be able to reverse" the damage.

What President Obama says we should do is spend money we don't have on bridges, roads, new school buildings, a new electrical grid, computerized health records, and tax "refund" checks to people who didn't pay income taxes at all.

The running total on this package is close to a trillion dollars, and that doesn't count the trillion or so that's about to be pumped into the financial mega-companies to shore up their balance sheets.

It also doesn't count the $700 billion Congress approved after the last president gave the catastrophe-crisis-emergency speech.

And it doesn't count the money we spent on a needless invasion and occupation of Iraq after Secretary of State Colin Powell gave the catastrophe-crisis-emergency speech at the United Nations.

The point is not that the danger isn't real. The point is that the existence of danger is not an argument for the efficacy of the proposed solution.

You may have dangerous salmonella bacteria on your hands after you handle raw chicken, but plunging your hands into boiling water to sterilize them is not a good way to solve the problem.

In his op-ed, President Obama complained about "misguided criticisms" of his plan that "echo the failed theories that helped lead us into this crisis." He mentions specifically "the notion that tax cuts alone will solve all our problems."

America Wants To Know is getting pretty tired of hearing politicians talk about whether tax cuts will or will not solve "our" problems.

If a tax rate of one hundred percent would create economic prosperity and jobs, does the government have the power to set the tax rate at one hundred percent?

Or do you have a right to the money you earn, a right that may not be taken from you in the name of providing economic prosperity and jobs for other people, for other cities, for other states, and maybe even for other countries?

Just asking. Somebody ought to.

Even granting the premise -- which we most certainly do not -- that the government's proper role is to take money from some people and give it to others in order to create a better country for everyone, it's easy to see from President Obama's grim expression that it can't be done.

It's the classic problem: If you subsidize something, you get more of it; if you tax it, you get less of it.

When the government announces that it will take money from certain individuals engaged in certain kinds of activities, people gradually stop engaging in those activities.

And when the government announces that it will give money to people who are in certain kinds of circumstances, people come out of the woodwork to declare that they are in those circumstances.

Run the numbers any way you want, if the government manages the economy there will never be enough to go around.

The answer is to give up the collectivist premises that there's a "pie," that people are competing for slices of it, and that the government is morally entitled to be the distributor. The answer is to accept the perfectly American premise that people are morally entitled to the fruits of their own labor.

The government should not be picking winners and losers in the economy, or subsidizing businesses that cannot succeed on their own with money from businesses that can.

There's an appropriate role for government as a policeman. Not as a kingmaker. Not as a life-support system for failing industries.

The economy will recover when investors big and small begin their day with something other than a news report on the latest government proposals to help them or put them out of business.

It's easy to say, in the face of a crisis, that we have to try something.

Here's an idea. The U.S. Constitution limits the power of the federal government. Let's try that.

Copyright 2009

Editor's note: You might be interested in the 2007 post, "Barack Obama explains socialism," and in "Defending Capitalism" and "A Plan to Get Out of Iraq" at www.SusanShelley.com.
.