A few weeks ago, President Barack Obama signed an executive order assigning Jeffrey Immelt as the Chairman of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. Immelt has been the CEO of General Electric since 2001, and will now succeed Paul Volcker as one of Obama’s top economic advisers.
To me, the appointment of Jeffrey Immelt to oversee a committee sponsoring competition can be compared to a situation in which Bernie Madoff were to be placed as Chairman of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Ethics.
Remember when the partial audit of the Federal Reserve listed the recipients of $3.3 trillion in bailout money? GE and Immelt were a part of that theft, selling $16 billion in unsecured promissory notes to the Federal Reserve at the expense of both taxpayers and U.S. currency in general.
Many other corporations took advantage of this program, but I don’t feel the need to name them right now since they won’t be ill-advising our President. Let’s just say I won’t be riding my Harley to pick up any Happy Meals on my way to check out the new Prius line-up.
Anyway, after using the monopolistic counterfeiting operation known as the Federal Reserve to sustain GE’s irresponsible financial activities, Russell Wilkerson, a spokesman for the corporation, said, “…overall the program was extremely effective in helping stabilize the market.” But the truth is that it only stabilized GE, tearing apart perhaps the most important – not to mention purifying – part of capitalism: loss.
Paul Volcker saved the economy when he sharply raised the Federal Reserve interest rates, which allowed the market to course-correct itself in the 1980s. Immelt, on the other hand, more recently took advantage of the Federal Reserve’s artificially low interest rates, and then got bailed out by the central bank of which he had been sitting on the New York branch’s board of directors.
Is this some kind of sick joke? If you want someone who knows how to create competition, find an Austrian economist. Who better understands the immense competition waiting to once-at-last break free in a completely laissez-faire economy?
The well-connected CEO doesn’t understand and appreciate competition, but what he will end up supporting is something that I like to call “corpetition,” a system in which specific companies chosen by the government are provided protectionist regulations that inevitably form a blockade against new businesses opening in the field – all in the name of fairness and equal opportunity.
Just like the bailouts were given under the guise of protecting against foreclosures and disappearing mortgages, the firms which were supposedly too-big-to-fail foreclosed anyway and gobbled up some smaller banks. The recipients of Wall Street welfare like JPMorgan Chase & Company have acquisition histories that branch out more than the evolutionary tree of life itself.
I pray for a day when the government will either disappear or realize that favoring free enterprise is the complete opposite of “favoring businesses.” Once there’s someone like Bob Murphy in the captain’s seat, we’ll have a much easier time making mutually-beneficial exchanges in the free market without worrying that our fiat currency will turn into a non-scarce good. Until then, leave it to the capitalists.
Reach Brian at brian.p.anderson@asu.edu
