When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. When it comes to “jobs,” our politicians prove the truth of this adage over and over. They think that they have to “do something,” or at least “look busy” providing “leadership.”
Wrong — unless they take the lead to get out of the way.
Alas, few have the courage for that kind of leadership.
Republican politicians — fearing “looking bad” — are, even now, floating various “plans” to create “jobs.”
“I thought it was incumbent on me to at least say . . . ‘We’re working on a plan,’” says one incumbent.
Trouble is, whatever plan he or his colleagues put up to counter the president’s absurdities, odds are that it, too, will not work.
Why?
The trouble with markets right now is uncertainty. Several sectors went bust, and it’s not easy to get progress started again . . . especially when the government keeps cooking up game-changers. Solutions. “Fixes.” Political machinations — subsidies or regulations or any of the usual tools in the politicians’ tool belt — just increase uncertainty, muddying up the recovery.
The neat thing about markets is that none of us need to know how, exactly, to order the “economy” for order to be discovered. It works out. This is old wisdom, but even actual experimentation has shown that this is the case.
The economy is not a mess of boards half-nailed down. The last thing it needs is more hammering from politicians.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
2 replies on “Nails & Ball-Peen Hammers”
Or newest Republican frontrunner, Mr. Cain, is setting himself out to be a “fixer”.
We have a national debt of 15 trillion dollars and unfunded liabilities of over 135 trillion dollars. We have almost 200 federal departments, agencies, programs, grants, bureaus, commisions, adminsitrations, offices, and foundations that are unconstitutional. These beaurocracies are not necessary for the federal government to carry out the 17 specific duties that the Constitution specifies as the only duties of the federal government. Without those, we would actually not only not need a 9-9-9 plan, we would not even need an income tax. And this without any impact on actual spending for defense. The duties of those departments are duties that the states have the option of enacting under the Consitution, if the people of those states choose to stay living there and pay the taxes to support them.
And Mr. Cain says that making efforts to cut down on those agencies is “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”. He is fine with the current activities of the federal government, but says instead that he and other businessmen, ”like Mitt Romney“, need to reform the government to make the govnerment more effective. A kinder, gentler Republican verson of the Democratic/Progressive government we already have. Up until this statment this week, I was an ardent supporter.
That’s big “R”. Not little “r”.
Thought that’s what kept us in this mess even after the Progressives got routed in the past.
Cain, like Romney, and like George W. Bush, AND LIKE THE DEMS/LIBERALS/ROOGRESSIVES are sure to want to reward their friends- and what better way then with someone else’s money-IE. the taxpayers.
See Romney- and his Mass. “health care reform’ and how that has helped that state.