Obamanator: The Rise of The Machines

“Winning the Future,” is one of the newest slogans from our campaigner in chief.  Obama whips this slogan out when he talks about increasing funding or “investing” for education.  However, it appears that the future is failing Obama.  With time technology constantly advances and evolves but it appears the future is the source Obama’s economic woes.  In an interview on the Today show Obama said, “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.” 


So according to Obama the reason unemployment is so high is because businesses have started to mechanize their workforces.  Despite this blatant economic fallacy, which Henry Hazlitt debunks in his famous book Economics in One Lesson, let us follow this line of logic.  In order to do so we must ask ourselves why is it that employers are using more machines to serve the jobs previously held by people.  Could it be the fear of healthcare costs going up when Obamacare gets implemented?  Perhaps it’s the rising cost of capital due to inflation?  Or maybe it is cheaper to pay the price of a machine instead of paying for workers because of all the hoops a business must jump through in order to keep employees.


Yet no matter how one chooses to reason out this fallacy one must always come to the same conclusion that it is not the fault of the machine but rather the policies of the government that drive businesses to mechanize their workforce.  Whether its healthcare, inflation, or regulations and red tape all of these reasons lead back to the administration’s door step.  So Mr. President it is not ATMs or Kiosks it is your failed economic policies that are causing these high unemployment numbers. 

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