Shrugging off Winston Churchill’s famous admonition that “it’s better to be silent and thought a fool than speak and remove all doubt,” President Obama graced us with a brief lecture on Economics Tuesday morning during an interview with “Today” show’s Ann Curry.

Dispelling (for some) rumors that his comments were vetted by professors of the Chicago School of Economics (or that Obama may have studied at the famed economics school during his tenure as a law lecturer at the University of Chicago), the President, adopting his well-honed, time-worn professorial tone, offered the following analysis of America’s ongoing economic gloom:

There are some structural issues with our economy where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers. You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM, you don’t go to a bank teller, or you go to the airport and you’re using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate.


As any student at the Chicago School of Economics could have counseled the President, Obama’s erroneous belief that technological progress (Obama strangely points to ATMs as evidence of such new technology despite the fact that such this particular marvel of science has been in widespread use since the early 1980s) somehow causes unemployment is both common and longstanding. As observed by Henry Hazlitt in his famous 1946 economics primer, “Economics in One Lesson”:

Among the most viable of all economic delusions is the belief that machines on net balance create unemployment. Destroyed a thousand times, it has risen a thousand times out of its own ashes as hardy and vigorous as ever. Whenever there is long-continued mass unemployment, machines get the blame anew….The belief that machines cause unemployment, when held with any logical consistency, leads to preposterous conclusions. Not only must we be causing unemployment with every technological improvement we make today, but primitive man must have started causing it with the first efforts he made to save himself from needless toil and sweat… The technophobes if they were logical and consistent, would have to dismiss all this progress and ingenuity as not only useless but vicious. Why should freight be carried from New York to Chicago by railroads when we could employ enormously more men, for example, to carry it all on their backs?

Shovel-ready indeed!

Given the clear failure of the President’s economics policy, coupled with the fact that his economics team has left him in droves, I respectfully suggest that the President forego just one round of golf, or one appearance on “The View”, etc. and instead take a few hours to read Hazlitt’s short, but marvelous economics lesson. Perhaps Congress should do the same – it would certainly serve our country better than the extracurricular activities in which our elected officials are currently reported to engage.