from National Review, Checkmate: The Economic Chess Masters Play a Losing Game by Kevin Williamson:

Our metaphors fail us. Our political leaders still talk about the economy as though it were one of Henry Ford’s factories: It creates so many jobs, produces so many pieces, consumes so much steel and rubber, and if government lent it some money at subsidized rates, maybe it could add another line, which would “create jobs,” etc. Create jobs creating what? No politician ever wants to think about that too deeply, because it means thinking about why demand for their pet projects is insufficient without their artificially inducing it through subsidy or mandate. At his worst, President Obama really does seem to believe that paying a man to dig a hole in the morning and fill it up in the afternoon makes the country richer because it contributes to consumer spending. This is superstition. Pull the consumption lever, watch production ramp up. But the 21st-century economy isn’t a series of levers; it’s a series of relationships. The nature of our technologically enabled present global connectedness means that for the first time in human history all economic activity happens in immediate relation to everything else. You cannot isolate the variables, which is a real problem if you believe in political management of the economy and see the policy question as nothing more than a really tough math problem.

The persistent failure of our current approach to economic policymaking suggests a very different role for government from the one that exists in the mind of the purported chess masters in Washington. President Obama, whose background is in the crank-turning mechanicalism of the law, is not intellectually up to the challenge. It isn’t clear that there is anybody on the scene who is.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/425012/economic-policymaking-obama-1930s

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