Ken Green writes over at AEI’s blog, The Enterprise:
Once again, our president is spreading the fiction that government is the source of all good things, in this case, jobs. President Obama is traveling around bragging about how his government is creating jobs, and will create more. But this is bunk: the myth of “government job creation” has been busted more times than Tiger Woods’ pretensions to monogamy. In fact, in my area of study, energy and environmental policy, nearly everything that the president and his allies in Congress are doing is likely suppressing job growth, if not killing jobs outright.
Let’s review how the real world works. In the real world, jobs are not magically “created” when some central planner in the Politburo decides everyone needs new shoes, windmills, solar panels, tiny electric cars, fluorescent light bulbs, recycled paper underwear, Rahm Emanuel action figures, or whatever. Jobs are created when consumers decide they want to spend money to buy stuff. That means that a) consumers have to have money to spend, and b) they have to be confident enough in the future of the economy to be willing to spend their money, and c) they have to be able to afford the stuff for sale.
The rest here.