Three days after the president-elect announced in a radio address that he had directed his "economic team" to devise a plan "that will mean 2.5 million more jobs by January of 2011," he said at a news conference that he favored measures "that will help save or create 2.5 million jobs." To the extent that his ambition is clear, it is notably modest.

It is, however, unclear. How will anyone calculate the number of jobs "saved"? In what sense saved? Saved from what? Saved by what? By government action, such as agriculture subsidies or other corporate welfare? What about jobs lost because of those irrational uses of finite economic resources? Should jobs "saved" by, say, protectionist policies that interfere with free trade be balanced against jobs lost when export markets are lost to retaliatory protectionism?
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In his wise book "Capitalism, Democracy & Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery," John Mueller, an Ohio State political scientist, notes that John Maynard Keynes's central theme, according to his biographer Robert Skidelsky, was that "the state is wise and the market is stupid." Mueller continues: "Working from that sort of perspective, India's top economists for a generation supported policies of regulation and central control that failed abysmally -- leading one of them to lament recently, 'India's misfortune was to have brilliant economists.' " Many of them were educated in Britain, by Keynes's followers. In America today, everyone agrees that the president-elect's economic team is composed of brilliant economists.