Barack Obama revamped his recovery advisory board last week to focus on job creation, and put GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt in charge of it.  Obama hopes to show a greater focus on jobs and the economy as well as push back against the notion that his notoriously academic economic team bears an animus to the private sector.  Douglas Schoen argues at the Daily Beast that Obama picked the wrong CEO if he really wants to get serious about job creation — and perhaps set himself up for criticism over GE’s outsourcing push over the last few years:

Yes, GE is arguably America’s greatest company, an industrial giant whose aegis runs from technology to aviation to finance, and whose stock has been on a roll, near a 52-week high thanks to profits that surged 51 percent from a year ago.

But how did Immelt and his team accomplish that? By large measure, jobs— specifically, eliminating them in this country. Since 2001, GE has shed at least 25,000 jobs domestically— and created an equal number or more overseas— while shuttering 29 plants in the U.S. over the last couple of years.  It’s also worth noting that GE’s financial arm received a multi-billion-dollar liquidity injection from the Federal Reserve during the 2008 financial meltdown.

If Obama missed the point, Schoen argues that the Republicans didn’t do much better.  Instead of focusing on the specific shortcomings of the Immelt appointment, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell used it to offer generic criticisms of Obama’s deficit spending and ObamaCare.  With both the budget and ObamaCare already up for debate in Congress, this amounted to a missed opportunity.  The GOP should have focused very specifically on Immelt’s appointment as a sop to big industry, when Obama should have been appointing entrepreneurs:

How refreshing it would have been if Obama, or McConnell, instead cited Schramm’s Law, a thesis developed by Kauffman Foundation President Carl Schramm that holds that “the single most important contributor to a nation’s economic growth is the number of startups that grow to a billion dollars in revenue within 20 years.” Specifically, Schramm says we need about 100 new, billion-dollar companies per year to establish an average growth rate of 3.3% or better—America’s historic average growth rate.

Kauffman research shows that new firms—not necessarily small firms—have been responsible for almost all new job creation since 1980; young start-ups such as Microsoft, Genentech and CNN, now cornerstones of our society, were founded during recessions or bear markets.  In virtually every recession, it is the entrepreneurs that play the most important role in job creation—they pursue new business ideas, undertake risk, invest their own capital, and create new firms. Yet there is no strategy from either side of the aisle that details how to encourage such entrepreneurship, despite a proven toolbox.

It seems to me that Schoen may be missing the point, perhaps driven by the desire to take Immelt’s appointment at face value.  However, there is more to it than just a desire to kick-start job creation — which is certainly a legitimate desire for Obama, at least politically, but not his highest priority.  Obama wants to expand his authority through regulatory adventurism, from which Obama imagines that a “fair” economy will then grow.  That strategy has been repeatedly confirmed through actions at the EPA and FCC, as well as the entire ambiguous approach of the ObamaCare law that all buts sets up the HHS Secretary as the Health Care Czar.

Entrepreneurs would resist that approach and would use the platform created by Obama to push against it.  However, large stakeholders in markets like regulation for the precise reason that their economies of scale allow them a competitive edge on compliance over entrepreneurs and start-ups.  A CEO like Immelt might talk about reducing some regulation, but GE and other massive conglomerates will usually end up backing government interventions in order to secure their own market share.

Either way, though, Schoen is right that Immelt and GE aren’t the solution for what ails the nation.  If we are to get the economy restarted, we need to do so by untying the hands of innovators and preventing the punishment of their investors.  One has to wonder how the populist Left that got Obama nominated and elected can sit so quietly while he links himself to a company that pushed so many jobs overseas during the last few years, too.

Update: Kevin Williamson has similar thoughts at National Review.