Wait, Wait! Government picked 7 Winners!

FAIL

The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works — whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified."

                – President Barack Obama, Inauguration, 1/20/09 

Grant over at NH Watchdog correctly opines on the Union Leader piece that showed that Government, once again, should govern and not pick winners and losers:

…7 jobs, compared to the 750 that Love reports were projected if the credits were fully utilized. Government does poorly when it tried to pick winners and losers, especially when its incentives come with unrealistic strings attached. And even those 7 jobs claimed are misleading. There’s really no way to know if any of those employers chose to hire workers because of the small tax incentive, or if they were simply taking advantage of free state money for jobs they would have created regardless.

Seven jobs. Seven Winners. That’s it.  It shows a fundamental truth – government cannot create jobs.  Period. 

By job, I’m not talking about a government job as unless that government job has an actual tax base to support that job, it’s just throwing taxpayer or borrowed money away.  Sure, that government worker gets a paycheck for some period of time, but it is not sustainable.  

Yes, there is a role for government to play so that private sector jobs, the only jobs that can be considered to be sustainable as they contribute to profit (and thus, taxes), can be created.  Government can make it easier for companies and entrepreneurs to either expand or start up by getting rid of excessive regulations, onerous taxes, and acting as advisors instead of adversaries. It can act in ways that can further the profit motive, increasing the incentive to do well.

They can also help by restricting their greedy ways: power and spending. But they are not. 

Instead, the Democrats are making it harder for companies to want to expand their payrolls by adding tax after tax after tax, fee after fee, and unleashing more and more regulations.  In this era of uncertainty, especially when you add in what Obama is doing at the national level, who in their right mind is going to add scads of new jobs?

Unless of course, you sell to the Government and are participating in political capitalism instead of free market capitalism.

Seven winners; the question to ask yourself if the distorting of the marketplace by Government with the tax credit, regardless of the "good intentions" of the politicians involved, would they have been created?  Ask yourself: regardless of the "good outcome" for these seven, what are the Unintended Consequences that might ripple around?

Some day, I should do a post about Obama’s words – while many may think that it is so (certainly Jim Splaine does, I’m sure), I don’t – certainly not at the Federal level; the states are free to do othewise.  However, looking at the philosophy that generated this nation (certainly exceptional compared to the the philosophy of the European social democracies that put the State above the individual that the Progressives wish to turn us into), I doubt it.  They left much to family, to friends, to neighbors acting in voluntary efforts.  

I have yet to hear why Bismark was so right….