Humpty-Dumpty and King Barack
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And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men
couldn’t put Humpty together again.
And there’s the problem, I thought, as I watched and
listened to our puffed up and preening president yammer on about
jobs and joblessness. Does he really think that it is within his
power as our economic commander in chief to fix this thing? Does
he really think that he and his government are capable of putting
the fallen Humpty-Dumpty back on the wall… in the pristine and
intact state of full employment? Does he really think that
they know how to do that?
President Obama likes to think of himself as an ideas man.
He complained during the presidential debates with John McCain
that McCain never gave him any credit for coming up with good
ideas. And in his state of the union on Wednesday night, he
reeled off a long list of ideas, some of which were okay so far
as they went, such as repealing capital gains taxes on small
business investment.
But what was most striking about the speech — apart, that
is, from president’s attempt to sound heroic at every turn of
phrase — was the paucity of thought, along with the lack of any
real understanding of the dynamics of business creation and
international commerce.
Why — with youth unemployment in our nation’s cities
running at close to 30 percent — was there no mention of the
idea of lowering the minimum wage, which now stands at $7.25, up
from $6.55 as of last July 24? Surely the president must realize
that if you (the government in this case) make it more expensive
for employers to hire unskilled workers, they will hire fewer of
them.
Ditto, obviously, with Obamacare. If the government wants
to force all employers to provide health insurance and then wants
to enforce mandates that will drive up the cost of that
insurance, it must expect companies to get by with fewer hires
and to contract out more work to temporary workers or outside
contractors.
And then of course there is the Obama-backed initiative
that would allow unions to gain exclusive bargaining rights at
more companies without the need for a secret ballot. This too
would be guaranteed to drive up the cost of labor. But Mr. Obama
did not use his state-of-the-union address to dump this
singularly ill-advised idea. Nor did he talk about the role that
unions have played in bankrupting the U.S. domestic auto industry
— and thereby destroying tens of thousands of jobs and putting a
like number on government life support.
The president reveals some of his worst instincts –
bordering really on the bizarre — in the area of international
commerce. Mr. Obama’s call for an all-out effort to double the
nation’s exports in five years is probably the worst idea since
Jimmy Carter called for energy independence back in 1979.
First of all, what’s the point? What makes the president
think that thousands and thousands of companies across the land
would want to rebalance their businesses in such a way as to put
substantially more emphasis on serving customers outside the
United States, and less on serving customers inside the United
States?
If the point is to create U.S. jobs at the expense
of jobs in other countries, then the president must be
intent on starting or bringing us to the brink of some sort of a
trade war. Is that a good idea, Mr. President?
Then there’s the slight matter of how an all-out export
drive would square with the bailouts and subsidies provided to
the auto companies and others. The government, for instance, is
already prepared to provide income tax deductions of $7,500 to
any American citizen who is prepared to plunk down $30,000 or
more for the General Motors all-electric Volt car, whenever it
emerges from government-subsidized development. In our new big
export drive, will the U.S. government send out $7,500 rebate
checks to people in New Guinea who also buy the Volt?
The president talks about how India, China and other
nations “are not playing for second place” and how they covet the
jobs we have in the United States. I submit that this is
dangerous prattle.
One of the things that you see in India and China that is
becoming more and more attenuated in this country is the spirit
of enterprise — the widely shared belief that you can improve
your own condition through hard work, initiative, and doing a
knockout job of satisfying the customer, whoever that might
be.
A year and a half ago, my wife and I spent more than a
month in India and we stayed in about dozen hotels — all priced
between $75 and $125 a night — in as many cities. With one
exception, the service was never anything less than superlative.
The one exception was a hotel in Cochin surrounded by a golf
course. It was a government-owned resort — and the only hotel in
which we stayed that wasn’t both owned and managed by people who
lived on the premises. There we confronted a variety of horrors
— ranging from the most lifeless and indifferent service, to a
flooded bedroom and the sounds of rats and other vermin
scratching loudly in the attic above our chamber.
When a taxi driver asked us how we liked the hotel, my wife
tried to be polite and said something about the food being pretty
good. The taxi driver would have none of that. He replied, “Well,
I wouldn’t stay there. I don’t like government
hotels.”
India, to its credit, learned to overcome the deadening
legacy of several decades of socialist government. Let’s hope we
don’t have to relearn the importance of free markets and private
enterprise.
