President Obama is giving another speech today, this time in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He gave another one in Galesburg, Illinois earlier this month. Richard Epstein takes a look at that speech here, and pinpoints the problems in the President's thinking.
The President, who has never worked a day in the private sector, has no systematic view of the way in which businesses operate or economies grow. He never starts a discussion by asking how the basic laws of supply and demand operate, and shows no faith that markets are the best mechanism for bringing these two forces into equilibrium.Via InstapunditHe constantly thinks of his greatest regulatory failures as his great successes. No other president has “saved the auto industry,” albeit by a corrupt bankruptcy process, or “taken on a broken health care system,” only to introduce a set of unworkable mandates that are already falling apart, or “investing in new technologies,” which tries to pick winners and ends up with losers like Solyndra. The great advances in energy have come from private developments, most notably fracking, and not from the vagaries of wind and solar energy, which no one has yet figured out how to store for future use when needed.
The President seems utterly incapable of seeing the downside to any of his policy choices. They are announced from on-high as all gain and no pain. In the face of stagnant growth, weak corporate earnings, and continued high unemployment, he shows not the slightest recognition that some of his programs might have gone amiss.
It is easy to see, therefore, why people have tuned out the President’s recent remarks. They have heard it all countless times before. So long as the President is trapped in his intellectual wonderland that puts redistribution first and regards deregulation and lower taxation as off limits, we as a nation will be trapped in the uneasy recovery that will continue to dog us no matter who is chosen to head the Federal Reserve.
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