Presidential candidate Herman Cain appeared on Fox News to weigh in on the ugly Hoffa-Obama Labor Day rally in Detroit, and made an interesting point about job creation:
The one reason the president and his administration don’t have an idea that’s going to work is they keep forgetting the business sector is the engine that drives growth. He is offering the same old stuff so all he and others can resort to is name calling. That’s all they have to intimidate folks.
When he mentioned about working people, tea party people work, too. The fact that the president made his remarks and didn’t offer one constructive idea about how he’s going the get this economy going and the reason is simple: he doesn’t have any. Zero job growth, and I’m looking Thursday for another zero in that speech that he’s going to give.
(Emphases mine.) Cain is right to call out Hoffa and Obama for their constant use of “working people” as a euphemism for “union worker.” America does not need politicians, or political parasites, to define which jobs are respectable, any more than we need them to decide who makes too much money.
Cain’s point about the business sector driving growth may seem like simple common sense on its face, but this is a very challenging notion for the Obama Administration. They most certainly do not believe the business sector “drives” growth. They think government does the driving, using ideology to decide which opportunities should be pursued (for example, “green” energy) and which should be discouraged (oil exploration.)
When the business sector comes to different conclusions, it is either cajoled with subsidies, or cudgeled with regulations. When the wisdom of the State fails to produce growth, blame is assigned to the business sector, for failing to obey its instructions promptly and correctly. It’s hard for Father Obama to drive when those snot-nosed private sector brats are making a racket with their toy corporate jets and ATMs in the back seat.
It’s easy enough to grasp the notion that jobs appear in response to opportunity. Obamanomics is based on the flawed premise that government can create these opportunities out of thin air, without a significant overall drag on the taxed, regulated, penalized, and subsidized private sector. Instead, these industries-by-fiat are mirages surrounding poisoned water. They feed corrupt data into the vast, diffuse intelligence of the private sector. Real opportunities are obscured by illusions that dissolve when the subsidies run out.
Take the green jobs failure du jour, Solyndra Corporation. They soaked up half a billion in taxpayer loans, to make them “players” in a solar-panel market that didn’t really exist. When they went belly-up, a network of other businesses were affected. They had suppliers, contractors, and service providers, whose long-term business plans assumed the presence of that plum “Solyndra” account, right down to their cleaning service and bottled water providers. None of Obama’s spectacular failures has been strictly limited to the industries he tried to create at taxpayer expense.
Even when government interference is discounted, and employment is viewed as an effort to take advantage of real opportunities, it is the business sector that initiates the process. With a few interesting exceptions, groups of people do not spontaneously congeal into corporations. Investors must provide capital and management to create the company, which then hires workers. This is not an inscrutable chicken-and-egg conundrum.
Understanding Herman Cain’s point that the business sector is the engine driving growth leads naturally to the conclusion that clogging up that engine would result in the sort of chronic high unemployment we see today. When you see people like Obama who don’t understand why draining away capital, confiscating profits, imposing high regulatory costs, and impeding business formation lead to unemployment, you can work backward to conclude that they believe the role of the business sector involves wearing a bit and bridle, rather than holding the reins.
