Obama has us on "The Road to Serfdom," not having read it

Now he tells us. He's been reading Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman instead of playing golf and shooting hoops, as reported by the press. While no one was looking, he's been downloading podcasts of the Glenn Beck show and checking out heritage.org on his iPad. He's a born-again free-marketer, supply-sider, and friend of business large and small. That's the freely translated gist of President Obama's July 9 speech at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.

Who would have known it? It is Obama who, as he "said in the campaign" and as he "repeated many times as President," thinks that the private sector is "the greatest generator of jobs in America." The "mess" we've gotten into is not his fault -- it's the fault of that commie-socialist George W. Bush. If Bush had cut taxes and government regulation the way Obama has been doing, we would have never have fallen into a recession to begin with.

Not so long ago, Obama declared that "greedy corporations" were the cause of all our ills. "Now is not the time for profits," he declared just after his inauguration. Now he tells us that "the private sector, not government, is, was, and always will be the source of America's economic success."

So far, however, the president has taken no action to prevent the Bush tax cuts from lapsing in January 2011. Absent congressional action, marginal rates, taxes on investment, and inheritance taxes will skyrocket from current levels -- and investment taxes will increase further in 2013 to help pay for Obamacare. But based on what the president said in Las Vegas, it was George Bush who was the tax-raiser, and it is Obama himself who has cut taxes. "One of the first things we did was cut dozens of taxes ... for middle class and small business people," Obama declared. When was that? Oh, yeah -- that was the extra $80 I got off my federal withholding in 2009.

It's not just that the president is a big tax-cutter. He has also created 600,000 jobs since taking office. (It is true that he has also lost five million jobs, but no matter.) About 500,000 of those new positions are temporary census jobs that are about to go away. The others have been created with federal stimulus dollars. A lot of dollars.

How about the Smith Electric Vehicles plant in Kansas City, which Obama visited just before coming to Las Vegas? So far, Smith Electric has received $32 million in funding to build electric vehicles. It's so successful that they've hired fifty workers. (That's $640,000 per job created.) The company builds the Smith Newton, a sporty little urban vehicle with a top speed of 50 mph. Smith Electric proposes to build a lot of Newtons, many of them to be purchased by the federal government. It hasn't built too many yet, but someday it will build five hundred, or even more. And someday, millions of green jobs will sprout up like green shoots.

This is the kind of entrepreneurship Obama is talking about.