President Barack Obama has just fired the chairman of General Motors, and if that doesn’t give you pause, here are some other interesting items.
The administration is trying to figure out how to seize troubled companies and the House threw a hissy fit aimed at undoing perfectly legal private contracts
“We own AIG,” said Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, speaking on behalf of the federal government as he tried to justify some sort of renewed, murderously angry French Revolution, this one in our country and aimed at executives receiving bonuses.
Unusual for him, Frank spoke some truth – the government is acting as if it owns much of the private economy. The most recent example of this is the administration task force that told GM chairman Rick Wagoner he’d better hit the road if he wanted his company to receive more federal aid and then laid out a detailed plan of operations for the firm.
As badly as auto executives have performed, can anyone really imagine the federal government can do it better? This is the same federal government, remember, that lost $3 billion last year running a monopoly Post Office and that has run up $40 trillion or more in unfunded liabilities for Social Security and Medicare. That’s a figure that some experts say could make the misfeasance of private companies seem like spit in the ocean.
The Obama solution to the moment’s economic crisis has been socialist takeover, spend, spend, spend, and plans for an extended welfare state along with regulatory fervor.
The bank interventions smell an awful lot like a Japanese program that is said to have caused a decade of stagnation. Even Europeans have been aghast at the spending, which has not worked in similar situations in the past and is opposed by at least 200 American economists, including Nobel Prize winners.
We already have welfare state aplenty – a lion’s share of the budget goes to this end even as leftists continue to overstate our supposed lack of a safety net. That some don’t have health insurance is a real problem, but is often equated with lack of medical care – either an outright lie or pure ignorance speaking – and we are continually misled to believe that some 46 million citizens cannot obtain health insurance. The actual number is more like 10 million, and most of them are without it only temporarily.
Heavy-handed regulation did not save some other societies from the downturn. The issue for us is as much what the next problem will be as what the current one was, and no one knows. The left wants to skip over its own culpability – how congressional Democrats, as well some Republicans, got in the way of mortgage-financing reforms the Bush administration sought at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
I join with those saying the economy is overregulated, costing businesses tens of billions that do little to no good while piling one encumbrance on another, and that any halfway intelligent stimulus package would get rid of regulations that can’t make it past a cost-benefit analysis.
Other steps would be to lower spending, enforce employer laws on illegal immigration and get rid of the payroll tax, in time replacing it with some less job-inhibiting means of providing revenue essential for entitlements.
Free enterprise, which has given humanity extraordinary material blessings on top of the liberty it affords us, has not disproved itself with this crisis, whereas socialism has disproved itself everywhere it has been tried. We can move closer to that system – and to hyperinflation and other catastrophes – or we can come to our senses.
Examiner columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He can be reached at: [email protected].
