To Improve Economy, Think Cellphones

Finally!  A short simple economics lesson even a liberal can understand from Herb Meyer at americanthinker.com.

Imagine that you have a new cell phone, and you ask me how to make a call. I tell you to punch in a phone number, then rub the phone against your leg and fling it against the wall. Did your call go through? No? Okay, I say, now try it again -- but this time fling your phone harder. Your call still didn't go through? Would you like to try it a third time? Or have you finally figured out that I have no idea what I'm talking about; that if you keep listening to me you're going to break your phone...

Liberals have been beating the U.S. economy against the proverbial wall for the last couple of years, pursuing 'fixes'—debt-financed government stimulus spending, Obamacare, and banking, housing, environmental regulatory changes—that are wholly incompatible with our free-market economy.

The key point to understand is that an economy is a kind of operating system. This means that if you want the economy to "do" something -- such as create more jobs -- you have to go about it the way the operating system is designed to work. Otherwise you cannot possibly succeed.

Think of it this way: our cell phones have operating systems built into them. There's no Republican way to make a phone call with your iPhone, and no Democratic way to do it. There's no conservative approach to checking your email with a BlackBerry or an Android, and no liberal approach to doing it. You just do it the way your cell phone's operating system requires.

It's the same with an economy. ... In a free-market economy like ours, it's the entrepreneurs who create jobs. They do this by starting new businesses, and by expanding businesses that are already up and running. If you want to create more jobs, you create an environment in which entrepreneurs will thrive. They'll take it from there, because creating jobs by starting and expanding businesses is what thriving entrepreneurs do.

No matter how they try, liberals can't change the way the American economic operating system works. They can either accept it and work with it ... or beat it and break it.

The good news is that our economy is more resilient than our cell phones. It can take a lot of abuse and still be made to work if only we start doing things the right way. The bad news is that if we keep doing things to create jobs that make absolutely no sense and cannot possibly work, at some point even the world's most powerful and dynamic economy will be broken beyond repair. And that's a lesson in economics even a liberal can understand.