Obama's War Against Innovation & Creativity

In fact, not only the stimulus package itself, but the higher taxes that it will require....are likely to reduce the number of entrepreneurs in America. _CityJournal_via_FreedomPolitics_via_NewsAlert

Entrepreneurs -- particularly inventor/innovator entrepreneurs -- are the carriers of "creative destruction" in capitalist economies. Creative entrepreneurs bring in the new and cause the obsolescence of the old. Without them, societies become stagnant and stuck -- like the tribal societies of the third world, and the hyper-bureaucratic societies of Russia, Europe, and North Korea.

"Stimulus is not part of the language of economics," says Arizona State University economics professor Edward Prescott. I talked to Prescott just hours before Obama set the presidential pen to the stimulus bill. "There is an old, discarded theory that's been tried and failed spectacularly, which is where that language of stimulus comes from." The stimulus bill, Prescott told me, "is likely to depress the economy."

...[Edmund]Phelps is disturbed by the thought that we may be shifting from an entrepreneurial economy toward a lobbying economy. "A lot of potential entrepreneurs, who were contemplating making an innovation and launching it in the marketplace, will now think, 'Well maybe the safer thing to do is to try to get that government contract.' ... And nobody does the innovation. They're all too busy trying to get the government contract." _TheWeek_via_FreedomPolitics

This is the other side of the "wealth and the IQ of nations" story. If a country is ruled by ideologues who lack basic wisdom and competence, then time-proven wisdom of the market is apt to be overturned by special interest social engineering. The end result is a severe distortion of the marketplace, with much-diminished innovation, entrepreneurship, and productive job-creation.

Markets understand these underlying dynamics far better than legislative, executive, or judicial branches of government understand them. The unbridled growth of government -- such as we are presently seeing -- is the death of markets and the economy. Hence the growing movement of capital away from the US and the US Dollar, toward economies where the market is still being allowed to work, more or less.

These interventions....tend to unsettle consumers, investors, and entrepreneurs by vividly demonstrating how political discretion can so suddenly throw everything up for grabs. "The scary thing is," Prescott says, "when this doesn't work what do they do? Start panicking and throwing good money after bad?" _TheWeek

Here is an interesting look at some of the deep, underlying assumptions made by various players in this game (via SimoleonSense)