A recent CNN Money online article entitled, “Dear Mr. President” asked a sampling of successful businesspeople to advise President Obama what to do in order to help the economy.

Their answers illustrate what is both wrong and right about the American people, particularly business owners.

Dr. Hurd inserts his comments following each answer.

“Make more credit available.”
— Matt Lewis, co-owner of a bakery in Brooklyn, NY.

“Credit” refers to money, specifically money taken from people who have lots of capital and loaned to people who lack it. Government does not “make” credit any more than it
“makes” wealth, money or value.

Government, at present, does control our currency through the Federal Reserve System. (We can see how well that system has worked out.) But controlling is not the same as creating. If there were no earned wealth in the American economy in the first place, there would be no government to take it over in the alleged “best interest” of the system. 

According to research reported in Scientific American Mind, about half of first marriages fail in the U.S., as do two thirds of second marriages and three quarters of third marriages. The researchers suggest that it’s because people usually “enter into relationships with poor skills for maintaining them and highly unrealistic expectations.”

It’s not just the expectations themselves that are the problem. The very fact that things work out so differently from the way people expect suggests that they don’t really know their partners. 

Former President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, recently expressed these views on abortion:

"I never have believed that Jesus Christ would approve of abortions and that was one of the problems I had when I was President, having to uphold Roe v. Wade, and I did everything I could to minimize the need for abortions. I made it easy to adopt children, for instance, who were unwanted and also initiated the program called Women and Infant Children, or WIC, a program that’s still in existence now. But except for the times when a mother’s life is in danger or when a pregnancy is caused by rape or incest I would certainly not or never have approved of any abortions."

"I’ve signed a public letter calling for the Democratic Party at the next convention to espouse my position on abortion which is to minimize the need, requirement for abortion and limit it only to women whose [lives] are in danger or who are pregnant as a result of rape or incest. I think if the Democratic Party would adopt that policy that would be acceptable to a lot of people who are now estranged from our party because of the abortion issue."