If Tolkien was right that the burned hand teaches best, then a
question arises: Will President Obama ever learn?

In a recent appearance on 60 Minutes, Obama traded in
his old analogy about the car in the ditch for a new one, about a
ship in rough seas. No matter how well the captain—Obama—steers it,
if the ship is being tossed about with violent abandon, then the
passengers will not enjoy the ride.

The implication is that Obama is doing a fine job, so don’t
blame him. The president is right, in part: The voters should not
blame him. But he is wrong about why. It’s not because the
president is a great economic helmsman. He is an awful one.
Consider his performance in just one sector: energy. The Obama
administration has shoveled boxcars full of money to “green”
energy, with demonstrably deplorable results.

Those results go well beyond Solyndra. Take the administration’s
policy of pushing electric cars, in which it has invested billions
of taxpayer dollars. As The Washington Post reported recently,
“analysts say the risk is rising that taxpayers in many cases will
not see a return on their money soon, if ever. Instead, they warn
that some federally subsidized companies could be forced to shut
down in coming months.” A123 Systems, a battery maker the
administration supported to the tune of nearly $400 million,
recently announced layoffs “instead of up to 3,000 new Michigan
jobs as Obama and the company had predicted,” the story
reported.

Despite a $7,500 tax credit for each vehicle sold, in October GM
unloaded about 1,000 Chevy Volts out of 187,000 total cars sold
that month. Even if the administration’s rosy prediction of 1
million electric vehicles by 2015 proves correct, that is a drop in
the bucket in a nation with 250 million cars, so the effect on
greenhouse-gas emissions—the ostensible justification for all this
intervention—would be negligible.

What’s more, electric cars get their juice largely from
coal-fired power plants, making claims about emissions highly
dubious. Battery disposal is a huge environmental problem. Electric
cars and plug-in hybrids are dangerous and expensive to work on.
(Ask your local mechanic for an education on that score.) And they
are hugely impractical. The Volt, a four-door compact, averages
30-40 miles on battery power alone. Then it needs to recharge for
10 hours.

Clara Ford, Henry Ford’s wife, owned an electric car. There’s a
reason the idea has been collecting dust for the past century.
Electric cars one day may take their place alongside the Internet
as one of the great life-changing innovations of our time. But
right now it looks as though they will join what Jimmy Carter
called the “keystone” of his energy policy, the Synthetic Fuels
Corporation, in the rogues’ gallery of gawdawful government
flops.

In short, then, the president is using political power to
reallocate economic resources to make people adopt an inferior
technology that nobody wants. So much for his stellar performance
as captain of the economy.

But Obama is less concerned with what the public wants than what
he thinks is best for it. This is modern liberalism’s chief
project: empowering a cognitive elite to correct what it sees as
the poor choices of the stupid, venal masses. (Energy Secretary
Steven Chu neatly summarized this approach when he argued for new
lightbulb standards by saying, “We are taking away a choice that
continues to let people waste their own money.”) And the president
is more cognitively elite than most. Or at least he thinks he is,
referring sometimes to “teachable moments,” i.e., occasions for
people to be given the gift of his enlightenment.

As California Rep. Dennis Cardoza, a Democrat, wrote recently in
The Hill, “President Obama has behaved more like Professor
Obama,” constantly lecturing others about their shortcomings and
trying to impose his will on them. “In the president’s first year
in office, his administration suffered from what I call ‘idea
disease.’ Every week, and sometimes almost every day, the
administration rolled out a new program for the country.” You don’t
get to the Oval Office through a surplus of humility. Still, it
takes a remarkable amount of hubris to come up with so many great
new ideas about how other people ought to live their lives.

No one, no matter how bright, can possibly know what is in the
best interest of everybody. Nor can any government, no matter how
large, possibly manage the monumental complexity of the modern
economy, or even one sector of it. Much of the current economic
mess is indeed beyond Obama’s control. The trouble is, he doesn’t
think so. And the harder Washington tries to run everything, the
more likely it will bollix everything up. The pages of history are
littered with case studies, which now include Solyndra and
(probably) electric cars.

Perhaps one day Obama will look back on them as teachable
moments, too.

A. Barton Hinkle is a columnist at the Richmond
Times-Dispatch, where this article originally
appeared.