The Obama Watch
President Obama, Meet Margaret Thatcher
Eight great ideas for jump-starting employment.
Mr. Obama plans to present a list of ideas to Congress on how to “jump-start private sector hiring and get Americans back to work.” Here are some suggested ideas for his list.
#1). Begin with the admission that that you, as the leader of our government, are not equipped to solve the problem of joblessness. As Margaret Thatcher said, “The fact is that in a market economy government does not — and cannot — know where jobs will come from: If it did know, all those interventionist policies for ‘picking winners’ and ‘backing success’ would not have picked losers and compounded failure.”
#2). Own up to some fuzzy thinking when you said last week that “I still consider one job lost one job too many.” This is the same mistake that Eleanor Roosevelt made when she wrote in a syndicated newspaper column in 1945, “We have reached a point today where labor-saving devices are good only when they do not throw a worker out of his job.” Jobs are constantly being both created and destroyed in a dynamic free economy. In a competitive marketplace, every employer strives to become more economical and efficient — investing in new and better equipment in order to reduce the amount of labor that is required to produce a given output.
#3). This is not — as commonly supposed by liberals — a race to the bottom. Rather, it is the real key to lifting living standards and generating stable employment. Through private sector capital investment, workers become more productive, better paid, and therefore better able to trade the fruits of their labor for what workers in other professions or industries have produced. As Thatcher said, “The right way to attack unemployment is to produce more goods more cheaply, so more people can afford to buy them.”
#4). Propping up losing companies like General Motors and Chrysler is ultimately counter-productive from the viewpoint of saving jobs. The essence of private enterprise is that businesses go out of business if they fail to satisfy their customers and provide a competitive return on investment to their owners or shareholders. The threat of failure hangs like the sword of Damocles over all business. It is a necessary and powerful incentive for improved performance.
#5). Now would be a good time to announce the cancellation of all future “job summits.” These high-level confabs bringing together leaders of industry, organized labor and government only serve to stoke the “fatal conceit” — as Friedrich Hayek called it — that it is possible to bring together a group of people who will be able to outperform the marketplace in knowing how best to run the economy. This is a socialist idea, and it has been proven wrong again and again.
#6). Now would be an even better time to announce that you have had a change of heart regarding the misnamed and undemocratic Employee Free Choice Act, which takes away from workers the right to a secret ballot in union elections. Elimination of this legislation would be an extremely positive step in restoring business confidence.
#7). One should dispense with the idea that tinkering at the edges with broad tax credits to businesses that expand their payrolls will do any good. This would have the unintended consequence of rewarding of employers that were planning to hire anyway. More to the point, however, it incentivizes the wrong thinking and behavior. Businesses shouldn’t start with the idea of creating jobs; they should start with the idea of creating value for customers.
#8). The best thing that government can do to help create private sector employment is to take less money away from the private sector by reducing both taxes and public spending. Again, as Thatcher said, “Since jobs in a free society do not depend upon government but upon satisfying customers, there (is) no point in setting targets for ‘full’ employment. Instead, government should create the right framework of sound money, low taxes, light regulation and flexible markets (including labor markets) to allow prosperity and employment to grow.”
About the Author
Andrew B. Wilson, a frequent contributor to The American Spectator, writes from St. Louis.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (45) | Leave a comment
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Appleby| 12.8.09 @ 7:09AM
The best thing Obama could do for the economy is to resign.
The second best is to shut up and get out of the way.
Let him concentrate on partying, making speeches, campaigning, strutting and Jonesing, and leave the business of America to the businessmen.
Oh, and stop pandering to the unions. One thing Mrs. Thatcher did that helped the UK tremendously is to decertify unions. Do that.
Big J| 12.8.09 @ 7:42AM
While I agree wholeheartedly, Obamao owes entirely too much to the SEIU and others. He could no more denounce those that elevated him to his position of power than he could stop making his narcissistic speeches.
I was on the verge of creating irreparable damage to my radio when I heard Obama's comments after his stupid "jobs summit".
"While the bold actions we have performed have brought our economy back from the brink, businesses are still not hiring. Production is up, wages are down, and squeezing more out of workers has become a part of small businesses' culture."
Here's a man that has never run a lemonade stand explaining to millions of struggling business owners that they are selfishly addicted to profits, and therefore not hiring.
Let me offer up a clue, Mr. Obama: It's your socialistic policy making that is hindering the growth of our companies. Get the hell out of the way, and let the free market do what it does best.
The level of hubris in this man is astonishing.
ACynic| 12.8.09 @ 9:43AM
No need for the messiah, Barack bin Laden Obama to meet Maggie Thatcher.
She believed in individual rights and freedoms and knew - from her humble upbringing and witnessing how socialism destroyed the British economy and social structure - that govt. is generally a force for evil, as big money and political power pollute and destroy a country.
But big govt and all its totalitarian impulses is what Obama is all about, for it provides him the opportunity to dictate and coerce the citizenry to do his bidding; all the while - with his millions in wealth and political power - he will be immune to the misery he inflicts on the citizenry.
Obama is the true left wing progressive communist fascist; a hypocritical, elitist, multi-millionaire, arrogant, narcissistic, power hungry tyrant.
It is simply amazing that if you look at all the left wing progressives in congress, how many of them are millionaires.
Al Adab| 12.8.09 @ 10:50AM
With The Left, what we face is a matter of faith over fact. Climate, and economics, to The Left, are matters of Faith and the successes of the past which contradict those tenents will simply be ignored. that is why we find ourselves in peril.
They are every bit as committed to their beliefs as they accuse the evangelicals of being to their own. Simply put faith in central planning trumps fact every time. We are in the hands of ideologues and they will stop at nothing- even creating crises as needed- to impose their world view.
Jim Hlavac | 12.8.09 @ 11:33AM
Stalin and Mao almost solved their unemployment problem by killing several tens of millions, lowered health care costs too, no doubt. The EPA has just grabbed the power to regulate my sighing at the perfidy of it all, given the CO2 I'm exhaling. Ceaucescu of Romania simply outlawed unemployment. One wonders when Obama will outlaw unemployment, thus in his mind creating jobs. Then he can start incarcerating the sighing huddled masses so that we do not befoul the air we breathe, and hire the last few diehard socialists just following orders to be the prison guards. But it's not just the O, it's the lot of them -- every Republican and Democrat and economic development official now serving in nearly any position of authority anywhere in the nation seems to believe that if the government takes from person A and gives to person B the government has done something constructive. They know not math and logic, thus they cannot create jobs.
It will crash eventually, and then we can return to our regularly schedule free market liberty, which will immediately rise up from the ruins, as it has done time immemorial, until the next great government sphinx like idea comes out of the graves of Pharaohs.
Richard Baker| 12.8.09 @ 12:22PM
Mrs. Thatcher is, to use an ooold expression, a "Right Broad." She is more American than the present American "leadership." She understands from who and where the "Capital" is derived. Can't say the same for the Kenyan and his Communist coterie. From them the answer is muddled at best.
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Roy| 12.8.09 @ 12:28PM
#9. Remember the hard part is creating salaries, not jobs. Government is GREAT at creating jobs: Filler out of Bureaucro-Blather From #4324326A, Shoveller of Dirt Out and Back Into Hole, Banana Curvature Inspector. However, it leaves the creation of salaries to us. And if we're going to have to create the salaries anyway, might as well be by paying for things we actually want(and you can tell we want them by the fact that we buy them voluntarily).
Pingback| 12.8.09 @ 12:37PM
The American Spectator : President Obama, Meet Margaret Thatcher links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
Philosopher | 12.8.09 @ 12:46PM
Until Obama quits thinking like a collectivist/socialist, he and his administration will be unable to create jobs. Here's why in my short post: "The Painful Process of Watching Liberals Trying to Create Jobs": http://pracphilosblog.wordpres.....eate-jobs/
Al Adab| 12.8.09 @ 1:09PM
President Al Naqis cannot stop thinking like a collectivist. He is one. It is simply a matter of Faith with them that central planning is superior to free markets and that government is the arbitor of social ills. They do not comprehend that the pie can grow, they think only in terms of redistribution. JFK knew that a rising tide lifts all ships, but the heirs in the Dem party are too interested in power and control to care what is best for the country or the citizens. Free markets, business expansion, creates jobs. Central control only creates bureaucrats albeit well paid ones. However, the eke out our substance like mistletoe does the oak tree.
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The American Spectator : President Obama, Meet Margaret Thatcher : PlanetTalk.net - links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
Carpenter| 12.8.09 @ 2:13PM
I lived in Britain before and throughout the Blessed Thatcher years, watched Carter and Reagan from afar and experienced the dead hand of Labour leftism and stagnation, the NHS and Brit unions. Those experiences formed my conservative way of thinking and my revulsion with whining nudge-winking cynical grasping hand-wringing counter-intuitive tree-hugging PC yoga moonbats and limousine liberals that could never survive in the private sector.
I like this list, Mr Wilson!
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Blacque Jacques Shellacque| 12.8.09 @ 4:35PM
Mr. Obama plans to present a list of ideas to Congress on how to "jump-start private sector hiring and get Americans back to work."
Private companies will hire more people when they are growing. They're not likely to grow when they're being hit with more/higher taxation, more/higher expenses of some sort, more unnecessary/pointless regulation, or other politically-created uncertainties that casts a cloud on a business' economic future .
I thought this jug-eared moron was supposed to be smart...?
Clay Barham| 12.9.09 @ 12:24PM
FROM FREEDOM TO SLAVERY
In the 1858 debates with Senator Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln said; “[T]here is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.” Keep in mind; Lincoln reflected the Hamilton-Clay interventionist ideals, where the central government and the “superiors” will determine the extent of federal “assistance” to infrastructure and industry in America, certainly opposite the hands-off policies of the 19th century state’s rights Democrats. The 20th century Democrat is closer to Lincoln’s policies than Jefferson’s. Modern Democrats tend to follow the ideals of Rousseau and Marx, where almost everyone, regardless of race, is inferior to the very few superior elite who must rule. Jefferson’s democrats were libertarians, and as such, figured individual freedom and a free market would establish superior and inferior by works and not by government or chains. Claysamerica.com
Tom Phillips| 12.9.09 @ 3:40PM
These are all great, proven sustainable ideas. However, the Obamaites don't care for (even loathe) private enterprise & a free market economy. they want/need power & control. Collectively today's liberals are America's "Yurtle the Turtle."
Bit Me| 12.9.09 @ 8:39PM
Incredible, Wilson! With all that ink you just spilled you managed to not SPECIFICALLY name ONE single job that would be produced in your Eight Points. Now I see how Bush put you Americans 11 Trillion in the hole and sold the farm it took generations of Americans to build. The ship is sinking and I can't say I'll be sad to see it go with Captains like you.
Richard Baker| 12.10.09 @ 7:48AM
Bit me:
As the Kenyan created more deficit in his first year than did all the Presidents since Washington combined, it'd be hard to imagine that W did 12 Trillion dollars in deficit spending in 8 years. Since you're probably English, how's the disaster that has been Britain since Mrs. Thatcher left going for you? Gordon Brown and the Communists who run England have done such a masterful job of leading the country off of a cliff. One would think that the lemming is the British national animal.
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