Economist Richard Rahn explains why not in this piece. He gets at a critical point I harp on all the time: government can do nothing that leads to more productive uses of our limited resources except to stop getting in the way.
Rahn writes, “Which creates wealth — the government hiring another bureaucrat to produce more paperwork for a gas-drilling company to fill out, or the company hiring another worker to produce more gas? The Fed can print more money and Congress can increase taxes in order to hire more government workers, but if their ‘work’ increases the costs on business… businesses will hire fewer workers. If the new government workers are not doing anything that actually increases people’s standard of living, they are merely a dead weight on the economy, which decreases the money individuals and businesses have to create real wealth.”
Of course, Obama doesn’t see things that way. He recently told us that the key to a better economy is for government to hire more people. He’s the most economically naive president of all time.
