In the past weeks, I've seen a campaign ad for the rookie Senator for Illinois extolling how many 'green collar' or 'green energy' jobs he will personally be adding to the US economy.
If one is to believe the ad, a man who has never really worked in the private sector in his life is somehow going to magically know how to allocate resources to create vast numbers of new jobs for other Americans.
Funny, because I thought that, in America, entrepreneurs developed ideas for businesses, products and services. Those that were good ideas brought in more revenue than it cost to produce them, enjoyed growth, repaid the inventor's risk and capital, while frequently creating jobs for others.
The only time the US government directly tried to create jobs was through FDR's failed NRA. Time has dimmed the memories of humorous icons of men leaning on shovels to depict the WPA or PWA. But the overall effect was to simply pay Americans for low-value time spent on the government tab.
Contrast that with JFK's more astute approach to stoking US economic growth- the space program.
Kennedy didn't create an entire new industrial complex of government-run businesses. Instead, a few agencies, notably NASA, expanded from its predecessor, NACA, was authorized to secure bids for designing, producing and operating the equipment which would take US astronauts to the moon.
In the process, for example, companies such as Intel prospered through government contracts for small, powerful microprocessors. The microprocessor industry was born and thrived, kicking off an economic growth wave in southern California.
It's one thing for the Federal government to set an objective, allocate funds and spend them via the private sector to solve appropriate problems or produce solutions.
It's quite another for a bunch of windbag Senators, led by one of the most junior of their number, to brazenly announce they will form a wholly new agency, staffed, no doubt, with cronies and other non- and sub-performers who can't make it in the real economic world, to unilaterally choose which technologies and businesses merit investment by the government.
Will there be graft? Corruption? Revolving-door lobbying? "Consulting" by old friends to the new agency?
You can count on it.
Scandals? Of course. Plenty of them, after the freshman Senator is midway or more through his term. Or perhaps, more safely, after he's lost his second bid for office.
But when have civil service employees ever been able to outperform the private sector in selecting technologies, creating sustainable, value-generating businesses, or legitimate, long-lived jobs in our economy?
Never.
With that track record, why is anyone giving any credence to Obama's claim that, if elected, he'll direct a firehose of Federal dollars, through an agency he'll form, to magically create thousands of new jobs that smart, private-sector businesspeople couldn't conceive first?
If there were money in alternative-energy related businesses and jobs, you can bet some entrepreneur would be, or already is, doing it. The only thing Obama's idea will do, besides wasting out tax dollars on corruption and stupid ideas, is to squeeze out legitimate, existing private sector activity in the same areas. Much as FDR's ham-handed confiscation of the private power production business did when he created subsidized Federal power projects, thus starving the sector of private capital for decades.
There's a history of the sort of public works Obama has in mind, all right. And it is littered with waste, corruption and ineffectual use of American tax dollars.
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