Barack Obama’s Creation and Salvation Myths
Posted by Thomas L. Knapp on Oct 30, 2009 in Commentary • 2 commentsNo, this isn’t a column on religion. It’s a column on government. But confusing the two is an eminently forgivable error.
Reports the New York Times:
The federal stimulus program has saved or created nearly 650,000 jobs through aid to states, infrastructure projects and federal contracts, the Obama administration claimed Friday morning, adding that officials believe they are on track to meet their goal of 3.5 million jobs over two years.
Creating! Saving! Two things that supporters of government would have us believe it’s all about, but which sound an awful lot like the acts attributed to God by believers:
For Obama so loved America that he gave his only begotten Stimulus, that whosoever believeth in it should not be laid off, but have everlasting job.
The main difference between government and religion is that while religion must be based primarily on faith, there’s actual evidence available for evaluating the claims of government. And those claims are inevitably found wanting.
God created man, the Bible tells us, out of nothing more than dirt and a breath of fresh air. He took inert substances and gave them life. He made things of no particular value into things of great value.
Government does the opposite. To the extent that it “creates” anything, it does so at the expense of better things. It devalues everything it touches. In order to “create” a job that pays $50,000 a year, it takes many multiples of that $50,000 out of the pockets of people who were already creating jobs with it.
Even taking President Obama’s lowball estimate of his “stimulus” program’s cost — about $800 billion — at face value, and giving his jobs figure undue credence, those 650,000 jobs were created (or, to include his fudge, “saved”) at a cost of about $1.2 million each!
Let’s make some very rough and broad assumptions about an average job here — assumptions which I’m pretty sure will make the “stimulus” figures look better, not worse, than warranted.
Let’s assume an annual salary of $50,000 (that’s higher than the actual per capita figure), plus another $50,000 in non-salary costs — the “employer’s share” of payroll taxes, employer-sponsored insurance and bennies, the pro rata cost of running the human resources operation that hires the individual employee, etc.
That brings the cost of a single job to a nice, round $100k.
So, if I give you $1.2 million and tell you to go forth and hire, keeping a fat $200k salary/bonus for yourself, you should be able to “create” ten jobs. Congratulations. You’re ten times as efficient as government, if only half as well paid as Barack Obama and without his extensive package of fringe benefits.
Or, to put it a different way: If Obama is the Messiah, his salvation program requires that ten souls be consigned to hell for each pair of feet set upon the streets of gold he claims to be paving.
And that, friends, is the good news. The bad news is that the actual cost of the “stimulus,” according to various think tank analyses, may have been four times the cost advertised by the White House.
Government doesn’t “create” jobs, nor does it “save” them. It doesn’t perform miracles. Rather, it performs stage magic. It makes things — things like money and jobs — disappear (into its lovely assistants’ pockets) through sleight-of-inefficiency. This is not done for the benefit of the audience.
Thomas L. Knapp is Senior News Analyst and Media Coordinator at the Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org).
The state, every state, exists for the benefit of those who run the state.
As Alvin and Heidi Toffler pointed out in their seminal book _Powershift: Knowledge, wealth and violence at the edge of the 21st Century_ most states impose surplus order. They explain that most people want necessary order. The merchant wants to have order in his shop, so that things he has on display are sold and not shoplifted. The homeowner wants to have order in his home, so that he can sleep at night instead of sitting up with a gun.
But the state wants more and more, and to get it, it has to steal from the merchant and the homeowner. To keep power, it has to impose surplus order, which means revoking passports, raping women who try to board aircraft, slaughtering children – some in foreign countries, and kicking in doors at 4 a.m. to drag parents from their screaming children. This order is surplus, the Tofflers explain, because it has no benefit to the general public, only to those who control the state. And only for a time, since the blowback from such activities is conspiracy, revolution, and bureau-rats eviscerated and hung from lampposts.
Of course, that is what is meant by such amusing British witticisms as “Hell or Connaught.”
The president of the United States is a constitutional scholar. By that term, I mean that he has taught constitutional law at the posh U of Chicago. He asserts that he has power to detain persons indefinitely without trial, without charges, without counsel, without benefit of clergy, without the great writ of habeas corpus. The president has, through his minions in the CIA and military, tortured prisoners to death – certainly four dozen, possibly a hundred that we know about, probably thousands more.
I regret that I cannot find the humor in any of this matter. It is all very terribly sad, deadly, and pointless. But I repeat myself.
Jim, you are mixing policies and President's. The torture stopped January 20, 2009.
As a defense industry brat, I can tell you that government spending does create both wealth and jobs. Indeed, the work my father did in the defense industry led to technologies that makes civilian air travel safer. It also led to the discovery of oil where it had not been discovered before (not because he designed that technology, but because he was able to keep an autopilot going that was initially designed with defense dollars). Indeed, all air travel is a piggy back on the design of aerial refueling systems. It also takes federally provided and funded infrastructure to happen and without it, much of our current commerce would not exist. While some of this commerce involves the exploitation of peasants, much of it does not.
I am not saying this to justify the state, but merely in pointing out that some of your assumptions are simply not true.