Glad that Senator Schumer has found a worthwhile way to occupy his time:

A half dozen Democratic Senators—led by Chuck Schumer, who else?—have introduced a bill to require that future [U. S. Olympic team] uniforms be made in America. These are the same geniuses whose tax-and-spend policies make the U.S. economy less competitive. A country that worries about where its Olympic clothes are made has bigger competitive problems than those berets.

The kerfuffle over the Olympic team uniforms is just the latest indication of something that is pretty scary: our nation is being led by economic innocents who have not the foggiest how business works. The most astonishing manifestation of this, of course, was President Obama’s insulting you-didn’t-build-that remark about business owners in Roanoke, Va.

The president’s utterance stemmed from a combination of ideology and profound ignorance about economics. The Wall Street Journal notes this morning:

This burst of ideological candor is already resonating like nothing else Mr. Obama's said in years. The Internet is awash with images of the President telling the Wright Brothers, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Steve Jobs and other innovators they didn't build that. Kevin Costner's famous line in "Field of Dreams," as adapted for Mr. Obama: "If you build it, we'll still say you didn't really build it."

Beneath the satire is the serious point that Mr. Obama's homily is the soul of his campaign message. The President who says he wants to be transformational may be succeeding—and subordinating to government the individual enterprise and risk-taking that underlies prosperity. The question is whether this is the America that most Americans want to build.

Here’s another question, also from today’s Wall Street Journal:

Can a President seeking re-election with a stagnant economy and high unemployment really be winning the jobs argument against a man who backed hundreds of thriving businesses? Can a President who sank taxpayer dollars into green-energy failures now succeed by attacking an opponent who funded winning start-ups with his own money?

Yes, President Obama's attacks on Mitt Romney and the company he founded, Bain Capital, are deceptive and hypocritical. But Team Romney is compounding the damage from this character assault by conceding too much of the Obama critique.

This story in today’s Washington Post is also germane to my point: taxi drivers say they are being pushed out of business by excessive regulation. Everywhere, it seems, people who think like Chuck Schumer and the president are trying to strangle the economy—and they’re doing a pretty good job, unfortunately.