George Mason Law School

Greg Johnson: Obama's ignorance shows contempt for capitalism

Is it time to pity President Barack Obama instead of pillory him? Robert Tracinski, editor of The Intellectual Activist and an Ayn Randian commentary writer, came close in a piece posted recently on RealClearMarkets.com after Obama did his demagogic darnedest to link the need to raise America's debt limit to tax breaks for companies to buy corporate jets.

Tracinski noted that Obama had recently blamed technology - specifically, ATMs - for America's intractable unemployment problem and how Russell Roberts, a professor at George Mason University, had written a remedial explanation in the Wall Street Journal showing how implementation of technology increases worker productivity, which leads to progress.

Of Roberts' column, Tracinski wrote, "It was a nicely done piece, but when I was reading it I felt a vague sense of embarrassment. It was all correct and very clearly stated, with good concrete examples - but there was nothing there that I hadn't read more than twenty years ago, in college. The embarrassment was not for me, but for Obama and his protectors in the mainstream media. How could they not know this already? How is it that they need this to be explained to them?"

Well, duh? How could America expect a first-term senator who worked as a community organizer and a part-time law school instructor, who has never worked in the private sector, to understand economics?

Tracinski delved deeper. "(Obama) grew up among leftists, his childhood mentors were outright communists, and he then went off to academia, where he spent his formative years in an environment where business and profit-making are looked down upon as ugly, dirty, rapacious, immoral," Tracinski wrote. "Is it any mystery why he doesn't know about business or economics? Asking him to study the economics of the free market is like asking one of the old New England Puritans to thumb through a manual on sex education. Why immerse oneself in a subject that is so unseemly? Why make a study of how to be immoral?"

Tracinski may be on to something. Obama's animus toward business is obvious - except when in fundraising mode - and comes from deep within him. If, in fact, Obama and his closest advisers see the desire to profit as "immoral," he must, by cause of conviction, condemn profits by oil companies, berate profitable health insurers, demand deference from bond holders in the General Motors and Chrysler bailouts and excoriate the Supreme Court for allowing corporations to exercise free political speech even though unions have invested heavily in elections for decades.

Henry Manne's QJAE Paper in SSRN Top Ten

, Has made it to the top ten most downloaded articles in the Social Science Research Network’s Corporate Governance & Management eJournal and Organizations & Markets: Structures & Processes in Organizations eJournal . SSRN is the number one open access repository in the world.

Prof. Manne is Dean Emeritus and University Professor Emeritus at the George Mason University School of Law and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ave Maria School of Law.

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