Trusting Obama to create jobs is like trusting an arsonist to put out fires

I didn’t watch the big presidential speech about “creating jobs” last night. Frankly, I just don’t have the stomach for that kind of thing anymore. I just wait to read the reports in cold text. At least the written news reports have the kindness to take out the most dishonestly self-congratulatory words.

I’m curious whether there’s any honest person — of any political persuasion — who believes Barack Obama’s new plan to “create” jobs is anything other than a political maneuver to buy him more time between now and the election. I wonder whether any honest and rational person believes that it has any chance of creating net jobs.

The old alchemists were convinced that their theories were right, so they honestly believed that they could turn lead (or pretty much anything else) into gold. It still hasn’t worked. Until not too many years ago, doctors had the odd belief that they could cure their patients of some diseases by bleeding them with leeches. It still hasn’t worked. John Maynard Keynes and his followers believed that they could create jobs and prosperity if they could simply force governments to spend enough money. (“Enough” always turns out to be “more than what’s been tried.”) It’s never worked, either.

I’ve only seen one plan by which politicians can create jobs, but it’s not one that Obama is likely to try. (It’s also not one that the Republicans arguing about job creation are likely to try, so it’s bi-partisan delusion going on in D.C.) If you want to see the one surefire way that politicians can create jobs, take a look here. It’ll work, but it won’t get them what they want.

Instead of doing the things that will actually work, this administration has been imposing new taxes left and right. Here’s a list of the new taxes imposed since the beginning of the Obama administration.

The only way that jobs are going to be created is for companies in the private market to do it on their own. There’s only one thing politicians can do to help with that. They can simply get out of the way.