The Secretary of Business

The Secretary of Business
By: John Hayward
11/1/2012 10:00 AM

So you want to start a business? Let me introduce you to your partner.

In a recent interview with MSNBC, President Obama wistfully dreamed of adding another incredibly expensive layer of bureaucracy to his Titanic Government model, perhaps forgetting that he’s supposed to be pretending to care about the deficit. ”I’ve said that I want to consolidate a whole bunch of government agencies. We should have one secretary of Business, instead of nine different departments that are dealing with things like giving loans to SBA or helping companies with exports,” he sighed, toying with his hair as he dreamed of Evil Businessmen kneeling before his latest almighty czar, while the Czar of All Czars beams radiantly in the background, waving off the intelligence officers who keep trying to pester him with national security briefings.

This is a remarkably clear window into the Obama mind, which sees no problem that cannot be solved by funding an even more powerful and unaccountable bureaucrat to control it. Notice that it does not even briefly occur to the President that maybe the real problem is the federal government sucking huge sums money out of the private sector and redistributing it, whether it be through nine different departments or one Orwellian “Secretary of Business.” Not only is government spending completely unrelated to the federal deficit in Obama’s thinking, but it’s not high enough. As he famously observed, “the private sector is doing fine,” and should be paying even more to shivering, malnourished Washington. His plans haven’t worked, so his solution is even bigger plans, enforced by a more powerful commissar.

Also, it evidently did not occur to the MSNBC crew to ask Obama why he hasn’t already proposed this wondrous “consolidation” of “a whole bunch of government agencies,” since he’s been the President for almost four years already, and conspicuously lacks reticence about using executive power when he wants to. He’s been heard to daydream about closing Guantanamo Bay, too, once he replaces the useless jerk who kept America’s Cuban concentration camp running for the last few years. With Barack Obama, it’s always about what he’ll do someday, never about what he’s already done, or failed to do. He just has to kick that incumbent Empty Chair out of Oval Office, and the good times will roll.

Is there really anyone in America who still thinks “consolidation” under higher levels of unaccountable power actually saves the taxpayers money, or improves government efficiency? Creating the Department of Homeland Security was supposed to improve communication among the many agencies tasked with national security… but here we are, over a month after a deadly attack on American soil that killed our ambassador to Libya, and the entire Administration is waving its hands and insisting that nobody knows anything about what happened, the State Department doesn’t really talk to the White House intelligence team, and (according to Vice President Joe Biden) the White House isn’t really part of the Administration. Who wants to bet Obama’s “Secretary of Business” would be better informed, and more forthcoming, than his Secretary of State was?

The last thing we need is a more powerful, less transparent conveyor belt for the bags of taxpayer money Obama loves to toss to his big contributors. The last thing we need is a heavier boot coming down on the businesses Obama doesn’t want to “win,” and a more generous hand writing checks to his favorite losers. The last thing this moribund economy needs is an accelerated process of Solyndraficiation. The problems with this Administration do not include an insufficiently vast host of czars. The chief business of the American people is business, and how we conduct it is none of Obama’s business.

The Romney campaign built an ad off the “Secretary of Business” nonsense, but no freedom-loving American who really cares about economic liberty and robust growth should need to hear more than the words “Secretary of Business” to run away from this Halloween horror story.

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To read another article by John Hayward, click here.