United Liberty

During his visit on This Week, President Barack Obama told George Stephanopoulos how his critics say he is “talking over every sector of the economy.” Obviously, Obama doesn’t believe he is, but David Boaz points out the nine different sectors of the economy that the government has gotten heavily involved in or is trying to get involved in:

Not every sector. Just

• health care
• energy
• local schools
• banks
• insurance companies
• automobile companies
• compensation at financial firms
• newspapers
• the internet

This president and his Ivy League advisers believe that they know how an economy should develop better than hundreds of millions of market participants spending their own money every day. That is what F. A. Hayek called the “fatal conceit,” the idea that smart people can design a real economy on the basis of their abstract ideas.

This is not quite socialism. In most of these cases, President Obama doesn’t propose to actually nationalize the means of production. (In the case of the automobile companies, he clearly did.) He just wants to use government money and government regulations to extend political control over all these sectors of the economy. And the more political control achieves, the more we can expect political favoritism, corruption, uneconomic decisions, and slower economic growth.

While it’s not every sector, President Obama and his colleagues in Congress, including some Republicans, feel that government is the answer to every problem that is present, however temporary it may be. That mentality has got to end.