In today’s weekly address from the President-Elect, Obama promises that the federal government will create 2.5 million jobs his first two years in office. Here’s the address, less than four minutes:
Any chance this means he’ll make a commitment to economic liberty? In the past few decades there has been a nationwide explosion of protectionist regulations — laws designed specifically to help a favored group at the expense of everyone else. There were about 80 occupations with barriers to entry in 1981, today there are over 1,000.
Recently I wrote a piece for the Foundation for Economic Education that says this:
In 2004 the Tenth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in Powers v. Harris, “[W]hile baseball may be the national pastime of the citizenry, dishing out special economic benefits to certain in-state industries remains the favored pastime of state and local governments.” And for decades, following the instructions of the U.S. Supreme Court, federal and state courts have stood by while legislators engage in this “favored pastime” at the expense of consumers and entrepreneurs.
In the absence of meaningful judicial supervision, politicians have gone to almost any imaginable length to protect special interests. When a powerful lobby demands protection from competitors, governments have been all too willing to invent — and courts all too willing to accept — patently ludicrous excuses for shutting down entrepreneurs. A court upheld Louisiana’s florist-licensing scheme, for example, because requiring florists to take a test, which would be graded largely on the subjective beauty of their floral arrangements, might help protect the public from “infected dirt.”
The true victims of this new “favored pastime” are people like Clemens and countless other Americans, honest individuals whose lives have been turned upside down solely to protect the politically powerful. Such examples are seemingly endless.
Obama could go a long way towards helping spur job creation by leveling the playing field in the marketplace, striking down special interest privileges and securing equality before the law.
Liberty Is For Me 