Excerpted from RCP, Saving A Million Jobs at $787,000 Per Job, September 14, 2009
The White House Council of Economic Advisers is lead by three presidential appointees. Currently, these are Christina Romer, Austan Goolsbee, and Cecilia Rouse.
According to their biographies on the Council web site, these people have never held jobs outside of academia. Their positions at Princeton, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago were protected by lifetime tenure. Unemployment, to them, is a theory that cannot become a personal reality. What in their backgrounds makes them experts on the subject of job creation?
- They never had to meet a payroll.
- They never had to raise money to fund their businesses from skeptical investors.
- They never bet their life savings on their own business judgment. They never had to scramble to pay off a banker who called in a loan.
- They never had to decide whether to take a calculated risk to expand their workforce hoping to take market share from a fierce competitor.
- They never had to make a judgment call on whether or not to launch an unproven new product.
- They never had to manage a reduction in force, explaining to employees that their jobs have been eliminated because the tax and regulatory burdens imposed by some new law forced them to cut costs.
- They never lost business to a government-subsidized competitor whose cost of capital was vastly lower than theirs.
- They never had to grease the palms of politicians offering constituent services to resolve a bureaucratic hangup caused by the labyrinthine government approvals these selfsame politicians inflict on many businesses.
- They never had to deal with a missed sales forecast caused by an economy so roiled by capricious and uncertain fiscal policy that frightened customers were holding back orders.
- They never had to deal with a key supplier that unexpectedly went bankrupt because their source of credit dried up as dollars got sucked out of the commercial economy into government debt.
- They never had to negotiate with angry landlords after being forced to shut down a business destroyed by spurious mass-manufactured class action lawsuits.
- They never had to stand up in front of disappointed investors to explain why they lost money that had been entrusted to them.
- And you can be sure that none of them ever fell on their face and had to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and decide whether it was worth going through all of the joys described above to take another shot at building a business from scratch.
They are prize winning experts in macroeconomics. They are ambitious, articulate, well connected, and brilliant.
But, what qualifies these people to work as high level apparatchiks of a governing class determined to manage the businesses of others?
Long after these experts return to their sinecures in academia to train another generation of economists on the wisdom of central planning and Keynesian pump priming, it’s we and our children and our grandchildren who will be paying the price.
Full article:
http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2009/09/14/saving_one_million_jobs_at_787000_per_job_97404.html
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