Friday, December 11, 2009

Job Killer! Job Killer! Job Killer!

That's the Republican refrain for now. Whatever President Obama and the Democratic Congress does, Republicans condemn it as a "job killer."

ObamaCare? Job killer. Cap and trade? Job killer. $787 billion stimulus? Job killer. Copenhagen Climate Summit? Job killer. EPA's CO2 regulation? Job killer.

Trouble is: they're right.

But then everything the government does is a job killer. Everything the government does is born of some frustrated scribbler who is irate that the unhampered market doesn't provide what he wants it to provide, for free.

Then he makes the fateful step. Let government do it.

Trouble that government makes a mess of everything it does, including war and policing.

Meanwhile the Obama administration goes on its way, taxing, spending, and regulating as fast as humanly possible. Barney Frank has a comprehensive financial regulation bill ready for the floor of the House. Did you know?

But all that is just noise.

The real trouble for the president is that the wheel of fortune is turning, as Victor David Hanson writes.

The real trouble is that the Democrats are whistling past the graveyard, as Mona Charen writes.

The real trouble is that climate change is the new socialism, as Charles Krauthammer writes.

The real trouble is that the IPCC scientists really were trying to pull off a trick to hide the decline in the Briffa tree proxy results that brought the whole Hockey Stick temperature chart into question, as Steve McIntyre shows.

The real trouble is that politicians always and everywhere want to increase the power of politicians. And the only way they know to do that is to bribe the electorate with free money.

The only solution to our troubles is limited government. That means limited power to regulate the economic sector. It means limited power to tax. It means limited power to spend.

"There is such a thing as society. It's just not the same thing as the state." David Cameron said that a few years ago now, and it encapsulates the conservative critique of the liberal administrative state.

Humans are social animals, not statist animals. Humans are citizens, not subjects. They are civilians, not soldiers.

And courtesy of President Obama and his little helpers, we are getting a national seminar in why this is so.

It's not just that government is a job killer. It's that government kills almost everything it touches. That's because government is force, and human society grows out of sociability, good will, cooperation, fellow feeling.

When will our Democratic friends ever realize this and stop proposing their poison gas proposals?

The truth is that they never will. They get whacked upside the head every now and then. In 1980. In 1994. Then they go quiet with their statist plans for a season. But then their love of power and bossiness takes over and they return with new ideas for force and compulsion, and making the state bigger and the people smaller.

Will it never end?

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