No, it has nothing to do with his administration’s all-out war against the private sector and energy companies, choosing oppressive government growth, regulation, and wasteful entitlement spending over lower taxes and inventive ways to stimulate private-sector job creation; no, it has nothing to do with that. President Obama blames the slowdown in this country’s economic recovery on technologies like ATMs:

“There are some structural issues with our economy where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers. You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM, you don’t go to a bank teller, or you go to the airport and you’re using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate.”

(Hat tip: National Review Online’s Corner Blog)

This is beyond idiotic, and perfectly illustrates to a “t” that this guy – The One elected President of the United States in a flurry of good-feeling, “Hope and Change” knows absolutely nothing – nothing – about how capitalism and free markets work, and how for every advancement in technology and automation there are opportunities generated for businesses to support those technologies.

Take those evil ATMs, for example: sure, they might result in the loss of a bank teller or two, but ATMs being as ubiquitous as they are still provide opportunities for busineeses that support ATMs and ATM-related technology, like loading them with money, collecting the money, auditing the proceeds, repairing the machines when broken, and creating more advanced machines. ATMs also help support local economies by making money more readily available (sometimes too available!) to spend at any time, as opposed to the good old days when if a bank was closed you were screwed.

The whole point of this exercise is to show just how ignorant (and ignorant is the only word I can think of here) someone who’s supposed to be so smart – smarter, even than all those he’s surrounded himself with (if you believe the myths and hype the mainstream dino-media has created around this guy) can be when it comes to a concept as simple as technology, innovation, and automation. If you want to take his argument further, why don’t we just ditch the ATMs, airport kiosks, and other conveniences like supermarket scanners, cell phones, self-service gas stations, microwave ovens, and computers and go back to the days of the town switchboard operator, the grease monkey, and the Pony Express?

It’s an absurd statement by a President who should have figured out by now that ATMs and kiosks have nothing to do with this country’s economic woes. Perhaps by eliminating the capitals gains tax, the estate tax, and giving working people a payroll tax holiday, reducing the corporate tax by 50%, and calling off his EPA and NLRB dogs he’d find out that technology in and of itself is not the source of this nation’s economic woes, his horrendous economic policies are.