Bill Frezza reviews the stresses of life in business today in RCM and finds that he has a few choice words for the current CEA as a result:

The White House Council of Economic Advisers is led by three presidential appointees. Currently, these are Christina Romer, Austan Goolsbee, and Cecilia Rouse. According to their biographies on the Council web site, these people have never held jobs outside of academia. Their positions at Princeton, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago were protected by lifetime tenure. Unemployment, to them, is a theory that cannot become a personal reality. What in their backgrounds makes them experts on the subject of job creation?

They never had to meet a payroll. They never had to raise money to fund their businesses from skeptical investors. They never bet their life savings on their own business judgment. They never had to scramble to pay off a banker who called in a loan. They never had to decide whether to take a calculated risk to expand their workforce hoping to take market share from a fierce competitor. They never had to make a judgment call on whether or not to launch an unproven new product. They never had to manage a reduction in force, explaining to employees that their jobs have been eliminated because the tax and regulatory burdens imposed by some new law forced them to cut costs. They never lost business to a government-subsidized competitor whose cost of capital was vastly lower than theirs.

They never had to grease the palms of politicians offering constituent services to resolve a bureaucratic hangup caused by the labyrinthine government approvals these selfsame politicians inflict on many businesses. They never had to deal with a missed sales forecast caused by an economy so roiled by capricious and uncertain fiscal policy that frightened customers were holding back orders. They never had to deal with a key supplier that unexpectedly went bankrupt because their source of credit dried up as dollars got sucked out of the commercial economy into government debt. They never had to negotiate with angry landlords after being forced to shut down a business destroyed by spurious mass-manufactured class action lawsuits. They never had to stand up in front of disappointed investors to explain why they lost money that had been entrusted to them.

Frezza seems a bit unfair. After all, Republican CEA’s are also run by academics. So the question really ought to be the attitude of the President towards private enterprise and the role of government. Suddenly, we’re reminded that George Washington was a farmer and Abraham Lincoln apparently got a US patent on a device he created. How times have changed.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 14th, 2009 at 10:15 pm and is filed under business, Democrats, General, Republicans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.