General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt, as I wrote in my column today, is a most fitting choice to head the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. Under Immelt, GE has become a company that looks for profit not in the free market, but in Big Government -- subsidies, bailouts, regulations, and mandates.
It's fitting because Obama's definition of being "pro-business" isn't about deregulation and tax cuts -- it's about subsidies and cooperation. This is why I define "Obamanomics" as Big Government working together with Big Business.
I also have described GE as "the for-profit arm of the Obama administration."
I list a few examples in my column, but I wanted to lay out a more complete list. Today, I will be posting many examples of the policies GE has supported, how they have advanced the policies, how the Obama administration has advanced them, how they profit GE, and how they hurt everyone else. I'll update this post with links to my examples, making this page something of a GE rent-seeking hub.
The point of this exercise is this: in a free market, companies profit when they deliver something that consumers want at a price consumers are willing to pay. In a government-directed market, mandates and regulations create demand while subsidies distort prices. As a result, Obamanomics doesn't just cost taxpayers and enrich the well-connected, it also replaces the will of the consumer with the will of politicians and bureaucrats -- this makes us much poorer.
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