Obama's Public Sector Full Employment Plan

[Geee]

Townhall:

Last week, President Obama said "the private sector is doing fine." This was not reassuring to those of us who suspect the Democrats haven't the first idea what "private sector" means.

He did not help matters by becoming lachrymose over the suffering of public sector employees: "Where we're seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government. ... And so, if Republicans want to be helpful, if they really want to move forward and put people back to work, what they should be thinking about is, how do we help state and local governments ..."

When Democrats say the public sector is suffering, they mean public sector employees have half the unemployment rate of the rest of the country -- 4.2 percent compared to 8.2 percent.

Obama's monumentally idiotic statement has led his media defenders to recycle Mitt Romney's alleged "gaffe" from several months ago, when he said: "I like being able to fire people who provide services to me."

But that was not a gaffe at all -- except as deceptively edited by the media to end after the word "people." (Only Donald Trump enjoys firing people, and by the way, people love watching Donald Trump fire people.)

Far from a gaffe, Romney's actual sentence is the key to understanding the nation's health care crisis -- which happens to be exactly what he was talking about.

Nearly every product you can think of has gotten better and cheaper in the last 20 years because of market competition: cell phones, television sets, computers, food delivery, airline tickets (constrained by the cost of fuel), express mail, and on and on.

There aren't a lot of restaurants serving lousy food or dog walkers who lose your dog because they'd go out of business pretty fast if they provided rotten services. They're not the only game in town.

But you know what is the only game in town? The government, including putatively private businesses that are heavily regulated by the government. Only with the government do we continuously get worse service for a higher price.

Take away the ability to fire people, and you have airport security, public schools, Veterans Administration hospitals, the Postal Service, General Motors and Pinch Sulzberger, New York Times family scion.

Health insurers may technically be private companies, but they are required by law to cover a slew of services, making them an extension of monopolistic government. (Similarly, the old AT&T was a "private" company, but in reality it was just a government-run monopolistic phone company providing no choice, poor service, little innovation and obscenely high prices.)