Barack Obama must think he is God. For instance, with Joe Biden in tow while campaigning in Toledo, Ohio, he promised, “We will create five-million new, high-wage jobs by investing in the renewable sources of energy that will eliminate the oil we currently import from the Middle East in ten years, and we will create two million jobs by rebuilding our crumbling roads, schools, and bridges.” Wow! That is a total of seven-million jobs to be created by investing. (In recent speeches the numbers have varied considerably. This god is not consistent.) Obama (and Joe) will create--just as “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” (Genesis 1:1) It is probably pertinent that God didn’t create jobs for Adam and Eve but left that responsibility in their hands. Perhaps the Prophet of Change and his sidekick are more considerate, more industrious, or more knowledgeable.

         Speaking of God and creating, it was another lord, the British lord John Maynard Keynes, who believed he had re-created economics during the 1920s and ‘30s, haughtily dismissing economic laws and theories developed incrementally over two centuries by the diligent, scholarly, and scientifically sound economic methodology of his economist predecessors. Keynes was responsible for popularizing, although not originating, the doctrine that government, by means of monetary and fiscal policies, could and should ensure what Keynes called “full employment.” This to be achieved through inflationary monetary policies carried out by the government’s central bank increasing the supply of money and expanding bank credit, plus fiscal policies of investing for the purpose of creating jobs. Barack Obama’s belief that he can create jobs by investing is in strict accord with Keynes’ economic doctrines.

         With a recession in high gear and threatening to become the most dreaded of all economic phenomena, a big, bad DEPRESSION, news outlets now provide their customers with a daily dose of economic analysis and call for specific or unstated government action to turn the economy around. It is my observation that somewhere between ninety and ninety-five percent of the mainstream media’s commentary can be labeled, like Obama’s campaign promises, pure Keynesianism. Most of the popular media pundits urge Obama to pursue policies endorsed by Keynes in order to pull the economy back from the brink. They explain how their proposed policies will work primarily by parroting meaningless Keynesian nostrums such as “pump priming,” “multiplier effect,” and “economic stimulus.”

         Now the difference between the Keynesian “school” of economics and, especially, the Austrian school, is that the latter may be labeled economic science; the former is best described as voodoo. In 1960 an eminent Austrian-school economist, Henry Hazlitt, compiled an anthology of scholarly critiques by twenty-two leading American and European economists analyzing Keynes’ General Theory , which is his magnum opus. Each scholar in whole or in part dissected Keynes’ convoluted analyses, arguments and theories, and by cutting through the enormous amount of entirely superfluous although admittedly grandiloquent verbiage of a master rhetorician, were able to show where, how and why Keynes’ “new” economics was entirely devoid of logic.

         A succinct summation of Keynes’ General Theory is a remark of Hazlitt made in the introduction to his anthology, “In spite of the incredible reputation of General Theory,” he wrote, “I could not find in it a single important doctrine that was both true and original. What is original in the book is not true, and what is true is not original. In fact even most of the errors in the book are not original, but can be found in a score of previous writers.” magnum opus, Das Kapital, Keynes’ convoluted General Theory managed to dazzle, daze and hypnotize untold numbers of wannabe economists and government officials who found in it “economic” justification for their wanton desire to spend other people’s money (OPM) with reckless abandon. How to explain the incongruity of armies of befuddled but rabid adherents of Marx and Keynes among ivory-tower intellectuals is beyond the ken of this writer. It is a task for psychiatrists and psychologists, who might begin by examining the role of federal-government grants of OPM to colleges and university for studies in the field of economics. Nevertheless, by virtue of a remarkable, mass, intellectual hysteria comparable only to that which accompanied Karl Marx’s flight into economic fantasy in his own infamous

         Since Obama’s policy prescriptions are derived from Keynes’ black art, his economic program is unlikely to be blessed by the Divine. Put bluntly instead of facetiously, President Obama won’t create any jobs because he can’t. He wasn’t elected God. Only those deluded souls who believe he is God, or who believe government possesses supernatural powers, will believe he can. People who believe government (or Obama as president) can do what other human institutions (or beings) cannot practice what the great Austrian-school economist, Ludwig von Mises, aptly dubbed “Statolatry.” Statolatry, also known as statism, elevates government to the level of a deity. Its practitioners are known as statists. It is a populous religious denomination in America nowadays.

         Statolatry is essential to Keynesianism, but entirely incompatible with Christianity, Judaism, Islam and every other monotheistic religion. The jealous God of Abraham, Jesus and Mohamed forbids His followers from worshiping other supernatural entities, not even one which, according to Keynes, is capable of “turning a stone into bread.” It is no coincidence that Keynes and Marx panned monotheistic religion. Although they professed atheism, their own words show they both practiced Statolatry and religiously worshiped at the altar of the almighty state.

         Economists know that government doesn’t create anything of value without destroying things of greater value in the process. In fact the cost of government benefits is always greater than their subjective value (viz., what an individual would willingly pay for them) due to the many inefficiencies of bureaucratic management and the corruption inherent in the political process, wherein very fallible people get to spend OPM, which is why enforced taxation in they only way government benefits can be funded. So the full cost of government benefits, including the waste and pilferage, must be and is deducted from the productive capacity of the private sector. The simple question real economists would ask Obama is, “Where will the money come from to pay the employees in those seven-million new jobs?”

         There are only three sources of government spending. It can tax, or it can borrow, or it can print money to spend. If it taxes, the private sector has that much less money to hire and pay employees, and no increment in total employment is gained. If it borrows, it crowds out private-sector borrowing, reducing jobs in the private sector by more than an equivalent number, because additional financial resources must be subtracted from the private sector to pay interest on the money government borrows. Thus, borrowing to create jobs is even more deleterious to total employment than taxing. If, however, government prints the money, which is what Bush has been doing and Obama seems to be proposing, there may be the appearance that government is creating jobs at no cost. But like other financial schemes that appear too good to be true, this one is also a scam. Fortunately, economists aren’t fooled by appearances, although lord Keynes was and his minions manifestly are.

         The easiest way to demonstrate the absurdity of printing money to create jobs is by reductio ad absurdum, which is a logical, rhetorical device to disprove a proposition by showing its ultimate consequences are absurd. So we ask President Obama, if government can pay seven million workers without eliminating that many jobs from the private sector by printing money, why not print enough money to pay all government employees, or even all Americans high wages? (This example of reductio not only illuminates the absurdity of Keynes’ prescribed policy, but for those who can think like an economist it also insinuates the intrinsic value, or more precisely the potential worthlessness, of government printing-press (fiat) money.)

         Not only did Obama promise to do some God-like creating, he also promised to invest $150 billion over the next decade in affordable, renewable sources of energy, $60 billion in infrastructure, and by implication, untold billions more to fulfil the myriad other promises he made during his campaign for the presidency. If Obama is God he should be able to pull off the investments he proposes, but if he is merely mortal his administration won’t invest a plug nickel in anything. Why not? Because government may tax, borrow, print, lend or spend money, but it cannot invest it. By definition, investing precludes government participation because investing is done for profit. No legitimate government anywhere has ever pursued or produced a profit. The bizarre notion of government investing wasn’t a product of Keynes’ sterile mind, but he advocated it, and his slavish epigones have deliriously championed the concept ever since. So here again, Obama’s promises mark him as a Keynesian, which is to say, economically illiterate and religiously a devout member of the Statolatry congregation.

         Austrian-economist Murray Rothbard, the best historian of the Great Depression, explained the impossibility of government investing somewhat differently. “Government,” he said, “acquires funds by seizing them from private individuals; the spending of the funds therefore gratifies the desires of government officials. Thus, government officials have forcibly shifted production from satisfying private consumers to satisfying themselves; their spending is therefore pure consumption and can by no stretch of the term be called investment.” From the standpoint of a nation’s future economic well being, few things could be more deleterious than substituting wasteful government consumption for private capital investment.

         Lest this parody of Obamanomics be labeled partisan, I hasten to add that both John McCain and George W. Bush are every bit as smitten by Keynesianism as Obama. To his credit, Obama so far has merely proposed to pursue Keynes’ failed policies, whereas Bush has signed into law more Keynesian-style legislation than his notorious Keynesian predecessor, Herbert Hoover. Both Hoover and FDR fell hook, line and sinker for Keynes’ flimflam, promulgating Keynes’ prescribed economic measures for curing recession, and thereby converting the business contraction and stock market collapse of 1929 into the decades-long Great Depression.

         The Bush Federal Reserve’s inflationary monetary policies inaugurated the current recession, and his Keynesian fiscal policies to cope with it are sapping the vitality of the private sector--the nation’s only producer of wealth. As a result, his successor may be forced by economic reality to abandon his Keynesian plans and restore the economic policies of laissez-faire, which provided the framework for the most productive economy the world has ever known. Keynes and his disciples have endeavored to consign laissez faire to the ashbin of history. Only the power of truth has kept its principles alive and vibrant among scientific economists during this age of Keynesianism’s ascendancy.

         Government’s unique characteristic, which differentiates it from all other manmade institutions, induces its acolytes to regard it as divine, and fosters dreams of creating and investing, is its capacity to use force when necessary to accomplish its objectives, initially to enforce collection of the taxes that pay for the ambitious plans of politicians and bureaucrats spending OPM. Inevitably, once force is admitted for one purpose and appears to work well, as it will to those wearing economic blinkers, it is certain to be applied to many other areas of resistance. Thus does the almighty state become the violent state.

         Economic laissez faire is the doctrine that inspired colonial Americans to discard the shackles of European mercantilism and adopt a regimen of economic liberty. Although laissez faire principles were compromised by the federal government’s sanction of slavery and its indefensible aggression against indigenous Indians and many small countries in the western hemisphere and as far away as the Philippines, nevertheless even this stunted practice of laissez-faire provided citizens–not slaves nor Indians--with greater economic freedom than elsewhere, and consequently produced the most abundant economy with the wealthiest people in the world. Even the poorest US citizens became rich by the standards of other countries.

         I suspect that Barack Obama is one of the most intelligent men ever elected president. If he is not deceived by the intellectual rapture that grips Keynes’ followers, he should be able to see that Bush’s monetary policies of inflation and his fiscal policies of intervention (e.g., bailouts, loans, etc.) in the private sector have utterly failed and are sweeping the nation toward an economic abyss. If Obama takes the blinkers off, he certainly has the acuity to perceive that government is the cause, not the cure, of the nation’s economic malaise.

         What then can a mortal President Obama do to assuage the recession without damaging the economy? By far the most efficacious would be to allow Americans freedom in their choice of money. Money is like any other commodity, with one important distinction. It is one half of most market transactions. For this reason it is of the utmost importance that it be free from government control and manipulation, protected by and subject to the discipline imposed by free-market competition. The free market, which expresses the sum of everyone’s decisions as opposed to the decisions of a political elite, has exponentially more monetary wisdom than all the government experts in the world rolled into one very little ball.

         The Austrian-school’s monetary theory of business cycles, first elucidated by Mises in 1911, logically shows that in market economies economic recessions are rooted in government manipulating low interest rates, printing money and expanding bank credit. In a word, inflation. Obama would attain the preeminent place among American presidents if he gave control of their money back to the American people. If market forces rather than government agents “managed” the nation’s money supply the American people and their economy will be relatively safe from financial depredation at the hands of Keynesian Kops (they’re not economists), central bankers, and government officials who revel in spending OPM. To facilitate such monetary freedom, Obama would need to order the Treasury and Federal Reserve to return to circulation the nation’s horde of gold, which was plundered from the American people in 1933 by means of the notorious, unlawful, executive, order of confiscation signed by Obama’s Keynesian predecessor, FDR.

         The Austrian’s theory of business cycles confutes everything Keynes deduced regarding economic booms and busts. Many economists have disproved Keynes' theories logically. The Great Depression disproved them empirically. After Hoover and Roosevelt had thoroughly road tested Keynes’ economic-recovery prescriptions during the Great Depression in the US, and Britain did as well, and those policies failed to relieve the Depression in the least, Keynes was forced to admit–and so he did–that "It appears to be politically impossible for a capitalist democracy to organize expenditures on the scale necessary to make the great experiment which would prove my case...except in war conditions.” More recently, Nobel-laureate economist Paul Krugman, an avowed Keynesian and staunch admirer of FDR, acknowledged that Roosevelt’s economic policies failed to alleviate the Depression. He recently wrote, "What saved the economy, and the New Deal, was the enormous public works project known as World War II, which finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy's needs." (Note that this prominent Keynesian, like many others of his ilk, regards the single most destructive of all economic phenomena--war--as a fiscal stimulus.)

         Referring to the thoroughly discredited "science" of eugenics, which Keynes warmly embraced throughout his adult life, and which Adolph Hitler espoused to justify murdering those he deemed unfit for Aryan society, Keynes said it was, "[T]he most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists." Keynes obviously had Hitler's Nazi regime particularly in mind for his proposed fiscal policies, because in his preface to the German edition of his General Theory, published early in the Third Reich (1936), Keynes wrote, "[T]he theory of output as a whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than to the theory of production and distribution of a given output produced under conditions of free competition and a large measure of laissez-faire."

         Referring to the full-employment policy concocted by Keynes, and in response to an endorsement thereof by a committee of the United Nations, German economist William Roepke wrote, "We would do well to remember that the ‘full employment’ of the Third Reich is so far the only example of such a policy carried through in peace time with some measure of temporary success. And we should also remember the tragic price that had to be paid for this spurious success."

         It would be insane for Obama to adopt economic policy prescriptions suitable only for totalitarian regimes and nations engaged in all-out war. If he does, his polices could ultimately lead to one or the other or both conditions. My advice for Obama: pray for wisdom, and exorcize Keynesianism from you economic play book.