What is the job of the President?

Two days ago, president Obama spoke to the media and said that the attacks by his campaign on Mitt Romney and his role at Bain Capital are what the campaign is going to be about. According to Obama, private equity is concerned with making profits, but as president Obama's role is to make sure that everyone has a "fair shot" and pays his or her "fair share" in taxes. That means, according to Obama, worrying about the laid off workers getting the retraining that they need. It also means helping communities create "clusters" (whatever they are) that attract new businesses. It also means having a tax structure that guarantees that each person pays his or her fair share.

Let's examine this a bit. First, think of the overall description by Obama of his role: guaranteeing everyone a fair shot. Taking this from Obamaspeak into reality, what Obama is actually saying is that the president of the United States has to decide who to help in order to give them a fair shot. Of course, being Obama, he never answers the question: "a fair shot at what?" But let's just assume that Obama means a fair shot at the good life: a job, a nice home, a good neighborhood, good food, etc. So Obama is saying flat out that his job as president is to pick winners and losers. The president will decide who needs help to achieve the good life and then give that help, assistance that everyone else will pay for with their taxes.

This is a perversion of the role of the president over the life of the United States. For over two centuries, success in the USA was determined by hard work, perseverance, talent mixed together with some luck. It is called the free market system. Government's role in that system has been basically two fold. First, the government assures the efficient operation of that system and prevents anyone from rigging the system. The court system resolves disputes. The SEC assures access to information to all those who invest. The FDA assures that purchasers of various foodstuffs and drugs are getting what they are paying for. The list goes on, but it never includes the government determining who wins and who loses in the economy. Second, the government has helped make the parts of that economy more competitive. Public schools help prepare people to succeed when they enter the workforce. National research programs help the American economy stay more advanced than other countries. Again, none of these efforts pick winners and losers. So, Obama is wrong about just what the job of the president entails. What he proposes is to distort the free market, in fact to undermine it by making that market less competitive and less efficient.

Of course, then comes the actual items that Obama says are the goals of the president. He talks about who has the better plan for job training, but he has no such plan to offer. He has, instead, a record of four years of failure in this area. Training under Obama has been such a failure that millions of folks have just given up looking for jobs in despair. He talks about who has a better plan for helping communities develop clusters to attract new jobs. Again, Obama has a record of failure on this front. There is no program that Obama launched that helps communities develop jobs successfully. Indeed, look at where the few new jobs are located; they are in the very places that Obama has not helped. The biggest job growth is in Texas, a state that rejects the very notion of state interference in business. On the other hand, in Michigan where Obama put the maximum federal effort of his presidency into the economy, there are substantially fewer jobs today than there were four years ago. Or look at the difference between Pennsylvania and Illinois. Both are about the same size in population and are part of the Rust Belt. In Pennsylvania, however, there has consistently been lower unemployment by a substantial margin. The reason, of course, is that Pennsylvania has accepted natural gas drilling using fracking which has created an enormous number of jobs. Obama's reaction to fracking has been to place obstacles in its way. Even though the EPA is specifically denied by law the ability to regulate the fracking process, Obama has nevertheless had it go ahead with attempts to control and stop the process through the means of regulating peripheral events that accompany fracking. So Obama has been a failure by his own measures.

But let's also get to the heart of the matter. Profits are not something to be avoided or disdained as Obama would have us believe. Profits are what attract businesses. Profits are what cause investments and new jobs. The chance for profit is, indeed, the driver of the entire American economy. In a simple phrase, "profits are good, for everyone." If Romney has the knowledge of where and how businesses can go about earning higher profits (which he does) and if Romney has a track record that shows he can get businesses to earn profits (which he also does), it means that Romney will understand what role the federal government can play to help businesses make those profits. And higher profits mean more jobs. More jobs then means higher profits. And the cycle continues.

Romney, in other words, is the one who actually understands what makes the American economy tick. Unlike Obama, he does not spout academic theories of "fairness" which have been shown again and again to fail when put into action in real situations. Obama's variation on Marxist economics (which is what this is) has never worked even once anywhere in the world. On the other hand, a vibrant free market system is what has given us the biggest and most successful economy in world history.

Obama is correct, the economy is what the election is all about. It is also the single strongest reason to vote for Romney.