"When you're president, as opposed to the head of a private equity firm, your job is not simply to maximize profits," said president Obama recently. He added, "Your job is to figure out how everybody in the country has a fair shot. Your job is to think about those workers who get laid off, and how do we pay for their re-training?" Obama continued: "My job is to take into account everybody, not just some. My job is to make sure that the country is growing not just now, but 10 years from now, 20 years from now."
To begin with, it is not the job of the president of the United States to manage the country's economic affairs. His job is to administer a system of public policies aimed at protecting everyone's rights as a citizen. That means everyone's rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness or, in short, the liberty of all. Not the welfare or employment or happiness of all but everyone's right to pursue these values. Just like the cop on the beat, the task isn't to get everyone to where he or she is going but to secure everyone's liberty to go wherever he or she wants to go, including, if that's how the citizenry chooses, staying put. (Freedom has no particular goal; it has to do with making it possible for citizens to choose their goals, so long as these are peaceful ones.)
But there is also Mr. Obama's colossal ignorance of economics: Jobs are created when wealth is spent! So when some firm, be it a ma and pa grocery story or a massive equity corporation, makes profits, those who own the profits, the wealth Mr. Obama so callously demeans, then proceed to spend on various goods and services they wish to have. No one just wants wealth − a bunch of resources sitting in a bank or wherever. The wealth is supposed to serve as a means to obtain one's children's healthcare, education, the family's vacation, recreational facilities, etc. And all of this is produced by people with jobs. Without the wealth, the jobs dry up.
So when capitalist institutions enable those who earn profits with their efforts, they are as close to creating jobs as anyone can possibly get.
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LOL. Funny, seems that an objective look at the data, which shows huge corporate profits and incomes of high earners have not been matched by gains in employment, would show anyone that the "corporate wealth = jobs" mantra doesn't quite work out to be true. Both sides need to stop with the hyperbole and half baked bs, come up with common sense methods of closing the deficit, and make smart moves in education that will promote the US's #1 asset, the ingenuity and productivity of its people.
ReplyDeleteThe essay is correct and Obama is a fool.
ReplyDeleteCreate jobs ?
ReplyDeleteNo one is owed a job simply for breathing. If you do not have skills an education or ambition or ideas and means of your own to make a way for yourself than you have no right to the American dream or having children simply because you exist. Go pray for a Job and see what that gets you.