Thursday, June 30, 2011

Wolf on Obamanomics

Dr. Milton Wolf's latest OpEd at the Washington Times makes the crucial point that, "Obamanomics is shovel-ready".

My favorite passage is when Wolf debunks President Obama's shamefully ignorant fallacy of blaming ATMs for unemployment:
Mr. Obama, meet Ned Ludd. In the early 1800s, the Luddites -- named for Ned Ludd, an alias used to conceal their leaders’ true identities -- sabotaged factories for fear of new technology. Their mistake was a belief that jobs themselves are prosperity when, in fact, it’s the products and services of those jobs that create prosperity. The government could hire people to dig holes and other people to fill them back in, but America would be poorer for the wasted effort. In reality, new technologies, from the advent of the wheel to today’s nanotechnology -- including the ATM and the iPad -- increase efficiency, which frees people for more important endeavors. This is the precise mechanism that improves mankind's standard of living.
(Read the full text of "Obamanomics is shovel-ready".)

Whether it be in health care or the broader economic realm, the current administration's policy of stifling innovation and replacing it with government make-work projects merely shunts precious capital and resources from productive to unproductive venues. In essence, it squanders the lifeblood of any healthy economy.