Major parties compete to see who can tell the biggest lie about jobs

By David McElroy · September 8, 2011

Like competing used car salesmen who will say anything to close a deal, Democrats and Republicans are engaged this week in a shameful contest to see who can tell the biggest lie about how they’re going to create jobs for out-of-work Americans.

In a speech tonight, Barack Obama will call for spending $300 billion to build schools, retrain workers and pay teacher salaries, among other things. (A CBS News report says this morning that the package might top $400 billion.) Meanwhile, the leading hucksters angling to win the GOP nomination twisted the facts last night over which one of them had done the best in the past in “creating jobs.”

Let’s talk for a second about reality. Politicians don’t create jobs. Politicians destroy jobs. Even if the coercive state is going to exist, the best it can ever do is step out of the way and stop crippling the market with taxes, regulation and populist rhetoric.

In a terrific article the staff monkeys shared in this morning’s news links, economist Russ Roberts brings up some of the obvious questions that none of the politicians are asking. The worst part is that voters and news media aren’t asking the questions, either. Almost everybody in the country has been so indoctrinated in the bizarre lie that government can create jobs that the point isn’t even debated. It’s accepted as fact.

Governments don’t offer anything of value — beyond merely peaceful stability and enforcement of contract law, at best. Anything beyond that is economically destructive. When the state takes dollars from one person to give them to another, it’s destroying wealth, not creating it. We’ve covered this before very recently, so I’m not going to go into the details again.

I just want to remind you to question the things you’re hearing from politicians about jobs right now. When they talk about spending money, ask yourself where that money comes from. (It comes from us, either through taxes or borrowing.) Ask yourself why we should trust them about this. (Their previous efforts have all been failures.)

And ask yourself why we let politicians get away with telling the same lies and why we never hold them responsible for their collective failure. Why do we reject one failed politician and then put an identical one — with another party label — in his place. That’s a kind of collective denial that I can’t explain.

Note: If you enjoyed Russ Roberts’ article, you might enjoy the weekly EconTalk podcast that he does. It’s one of the highlights of my week when new one-hour episodes come out each Monday. You can subscribe via iTunes.

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Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

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