Crisis of Confidence

[SSG Snuggle Bunny]

The Crisis of Confidenceposted at 5:28 pm on September 8, 2009 by Doctor Zero

The Jones scandal, and the sour note struck by the President’s student address, are symptoms of the larger ailment overtaking both the Obama government and the economy. Government has only one resource, the use of force, through which it collects taxes and enforces laws. It uses this resource to create one useful product for the national economy: confidence. Defending the borders, and policing the interior of the country, creates a sense of confidence that increases prosperity, as do reasonable standards for testing products and issuing professional licenses. Like all other government powers, testing and licensing can be taken to extremes, or abused for the benefit of favored constituencies - but, as a general proposition, consumer confidence is increased by knowing that products and services meet certain accepted standards. Government provides a reasonably stable currency, and enforceable contract laws, to make high level business transactions possible. It doesn’t take much imagination to see that a lawless wasteland, ruled by warlords, would be restricted to a very primitive economy. Examples of this are distressingly easy to find in the modern world.

Consider the fallout from the Van Jones resignation. I haven’t been able to find much specific information about exactly what Jones had actually done as Green Jobs Czar, besides make a fool of himself. Let’s assume he was performing the nominal functions of his position, meeting with business owners to encourage “green job creation,” a task he was given a budget of at least thirty billion tax dollars to accomplish. It seems unlikely that all of those business owners were Fox News watchers, Glenn Beck fans, or regular readers of conservative blogs like Hot Air. The Jones resignation would have come as a bolt from the blue for those who were not. They picked up the papers yesterday, or arrived in the office after the long holiday weekend, to discover their thirty billion dollar “business partner” was gone… and never should have held his office in the first place. What do you suppose that does for their confidence in the Obama government? Does it build a business environment that makes companies eager to invest money, take entrepreneurial risks, and create new jobs?

There is no logical reason for citizens to feel secure when an activist government is rampaging through the private sector. There is no reason to take the legislative proposals of politicians on faith, or trust them to fill in the little details later. The monster bills churned out by Democrats include hundreds of penalties to be leveled against citizens who don’t comply with the legislation. Instead, they should be filled with hard and merciless penalties for politicians who act outside the carefully limited powers they are given. Iron bars are the only things that make people feel secure in the presence of a hungry tiger.

When the government becomes a player in the economy, it inevitably forfeits its ability to serve as an impartial referee. It begins producing uncertainty instead of confidence. An unstable, aggressive Administration magnifies this effect, because the middle class is always the battlefield between the warring agendas of the elite, and the conflicting demands of the dependency class. Politicians will always have opponents, and no President could reasonably expect the complete trust of the entire electorate… but as Obama is demonstrating, it’s not difficult to lose the trust of the entire electorate. George Bush did it by disappearing in his second term. Obama would probably benefit if he disappeared for a while, and took his constellation of czars with him.

http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2009/09/08/the-crisis-of-confidence/

Hear! Hear!

[DixieBelle]

I love that! Esp. the last bolded part.