An Obamanation Against Free Enterprise

The Wall Street Journal is reporting the Obama administration is banning internships within private businesses.

Barack Obama is telling teenagers and college students, who are now suffering through a 26% unemployment rate, that they are not allowed to volunteer their time in the free market in exchange for acquiring valuable and relevant job skills that might, just might, get them off the unemployment line — and that ignores the ability to make valuable connections through networking in the workplace and build relationships for future careers and opportunities.

“If … you want to pursue an internship with a for-profit employer, there aren’t going to be many circumstances where you can have an internship and not be paid and still be in compliance with the law,” the Labor Department’s Nancy J. Leppink tells the New York Times.

Since the nation was formed and even before that, apprenticeships and then internships have been a key way for students to acquire valuable jobs skills.

Companies would, frequently through college programs, agree to put a student to work teaching the student a trade. The company would get free labor and the student would, at no cost, get job skills.

It is a tried and true method of acquiring skills in this country. But the Obama administration is declaring such an act against the law.

If you want to work as a Congressional or White House intern, for Organizing for America, or any other non-profit, they’ll let you do it.

But if you want to actually work for a business that produces goods and services in the free market? You’re screwed as is the business.

And guess what? Existing workers will be spread more thinly and college kids will wait longer and longer for jobs.

Barack Obama is opposed to the American free enterprise system. Barack Obama is opposed to an individual’s right to make the individual’s own decisions about what is in the individual’s own best interest.

by Erick Erickson