In 1790, farmers were 90 percent, out of a population of nearly 3 million, of the U.S. labor force. By 1900, only about 41 percent of our labor force was employed in agriculture. By 2008, fewer than 3 percent of Americans were employed in agriculture. Through labor-saving technological advances and machinery, our farmers are the world’s most productive. As a result, Americans are better off.

In 1970, the telecommunications industry employed 421,000 workers as switchboard operators, annually handling 9.8 billion long-distance calls. Today the telecommunications industry employs only 78,000 operators. That’s a tremendous 80 percent job loss. What happened? The answer: There have been spectacular labor-saving advances in telecommunications. Today more than 100 billion long-distance calls a year require only 78,000 switchboard operators. What’s more is the cost of making a long-distance call is a tiny fraction of what it was in 1970. Can we say these technological innovations made the nation worse off?

Professor Russell Roberts, my George Mason University colleague, gives other examples in his Wall Street Journal article (6/22/2011) “Obama vs. ATM’s: Why Technology Doesn’t Destroy Jobs.” He says that today just a couple of workers can manage the egg-laying operation of nearly a million chickens laying 240 million eggs a year, through a highly mechanized and computerized process. Thousands of toll collectors are replaced by E-ZPass machines. Autoworkers are replaced by robots. Fifty years ago, a typical textile worker operated five machines capable of running thread through a loom 100 times a minute. Today machines run six times as fast, and one worker can oversee 100 of them.

You say, “Williams, certain jobs are destroyed by technology.” You’re right, but many more are created. Think about it. If 90 percent of Americans still had been farmers in 1900, where in the world would we have gotten workers to produce all those goods that were not even heard of in 1790, such as telephones, steamships and oil wells? We need not go back that far. If there hadn’t been the kind of labor-saving technical innovation we’ve had since the 1950s — in the auto, construction, telephone industries and many others — where in the world would we have gotten workers to produce things that weren’t heard of in the ’50s, such as desktop computers, cellphones, HDTVs, digital cameras, MRI machines, pharmaceuticals and myriad other goods and services?

What technological innovation does is reduce the value of some jobs, raise the value of others and create many more jobs. Some workers are made better off through greater employment opportunities. Others are made worse off by having to accept less attractive employment opportunities, an adjustment process that can be painful. Since technological progress makes goods and services cheaper, and of higher quality, to stand in its way, in the name of saving jobs, will make us a poorer nation. What we’re witnessing in our economy is what economic historian Joseph Schumpeter termed “creative destruction,” the process in which something new replaces something older.

By the way, we can always count upon an infinite number of potential jobs. The reason is that human wants are insatiable. People always want more of something. That want will create jobs for someone else.

On the surface, the president said many things with which conservatives might agree, but words can mean something, or they can mask true intentions.

There was no indication the president plans to retreat on his far-left agenda of the last two years. Why should he? That would require denying who he is.

Absent the glamorous rhetoric, let’s examine the major subjects on which the president touched.

EDUCATION: Anyone who has seen the film “Waiting for Superman” knows the public education system in this country is a mess and that if all the money now being spent on education isn’t improving the product, especially for the poor, whom Democrats are supposed to be championing, more money will not help. Competition through school choice would improve education. The speech was another sop to teachers’ unions that care more about their members than students’ futures.

INNOVATION: Government doesn’t innovate. It regulates. It taxes. According to The Cato Institute (www.cato.org/), the average combined federal and state corporate tax rate in the U.S. is 40 percent, first among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Japan comes in second with a combined rate of 35.7 percent. In his speech, the president said he supports reducing the corporate tax rate for the first time in 25 years, but then came the caveat: “without adding to our deficit.” Cutting taxes without reducing spending will add to the deficit and so the president can eschew responsibility when Democrats refuse to vote for business tax reductions.

DEFICIT REDUCTION: Where to begin? A president and until recently an all-Democratic Congress has put our financial house in jeopardy by running up a $14 trillion debt. In March 2006, when he was a senator, Obama called the $8.27 trillion debt ceiling “a sign of leadership failure.” If the debt ceiling during the George W. Bush presidency was a sign of failed leadership, who’s failing in his leadership when the debt has climbed to $14 trillion? Deficit reduction will come when the government cuts (not caps) spending.

REFORMING GOVERNMENT: The best way to “reform” government is to reduce unneeded and unnecessary programs and agencies. Congress should establish a commission similar to the successful Base Realignment and Closing Commission (BRAC), which shuttered outmoded military bases. Every government agency and program should be required to justify its existence consistent with its cost and benefit to the greatest number of Americans. If they can’t, they should be eliminated.

INFRASTRUCTURE: From better roads to high-speed inter- and intra-city trains, the U.S. lags behind many European and Asian countries in providing low-cost, efficient and fast transportation for its citizens. It is one of the few areas where Americans would be willing to pay more in fares or even taxes to improve the way we move around.

Included in infrastructure ought to be the mining of America’s considerable natural gas supply and a “to the moon” emphasis on nuclear power and drilling for more oil in America’s backyard to ease our dependence on foreign oil. It will take years to break our foreign oil addiction and so new sources of petroleum on American territory must be explored, something this president won’t do.

Curiously, Obama invoked a space analogy, mentioning the Russian “Sputnik” satellite launched in 1957 and the American Apollo program that sent astronauts to the moon in 1969. And yet this president has effectively mothballed our space program at a time when China is moving rapidly forward with theirs.

The president’s speech was all about new spending (“investment” he called it), no matter what he said about reducing the deficit. Spending on big government is what liberals do. No one should be fooled by the rhetoric, or the theatrics of congressional Republicans and Democrats sitting together. The Republican challenge is to stop the president’s liberal agenda while making the case for a better one.

What is ironic is that kerosene lamps were a luxury of the rich in the 19th century, before John D. Rockefeller came along. At the high price of kerosene at that time, an ordinary working man could not afford to stay up at night, burning this expensive fuel for hours at a time.

Rockefeller did not begin his life as rich, by any means. He made a fortune by revolutionizing the petroleum industry. Although we still measure petroleum in barrels, it is actually shipped in railroad tank cars, in ocean-going tankers and in tanker trucks.

That is a legacy of John D. Rockefeller, who saw that shipping oil in barrels was not as economical as shipping whole railroad tank cars full of oil, eliminating all the labor that had to go into shipping the same amount of oil in numerous individual barrels.

That was just one of his cost-cutting innovations. If there was a better way to extract, process and ship petroleum products– or more products that could be made from petroleum– Rockefeller was on top of it.

Before he came along, gasoline was considered a useless by-product that petroleum refineries often simply dumped into the nearest river. But Rockefeller decided to use it as a fuel in the refining process, which made it valuable, even before automobiles came along.

Today, we tend to think of John D. Rockefeller as just one of those famous rich people. But Rockefeller didn’t just “happen to have money.” How he got rich is the real story– and it is a story whose implications reach far beyond that one particular individual.

Before Rockefeller’s innovations reduced the price of kerosene to a fraction of what it had once been, there wasn’t a lot for poor people to do when nightfall came, other than go to bed. But the advent of cheap kerosene added hours of light and activity to each day for people with low or moderate incomes.

It was much the same story with the advent of the automobile, which gave millions of people more range in space, as kerosene (and, later, electricity) gave them more range in terms of hours of daily activity.

Here again, automobiles and electric lights were truly luxuries of the rich when they began. Only after ways were developed to cut their costs drastically were such things brought within the reach of ordinary Americans.

Henry Ford’s mass production methods cut in half the cost of producing the famous Model T Ford in just five years. People who had once lived their entire lives within a narrow radius of a relatively few miles could now go see places they never knew about before. The automobile expanded their horizons.

People today who complain about the automobile’s pollution have no idea how much more pollution there was before the automobile came along. In New York City, for example, the 40,000 horses that were the backbone of the city’s transportation, before the automobile, produced 400 tons of manure per working day, along with 20,000 gallons of urine.

At one time, people like Rockefeller, Edison, Ford and the Wright brothers were regarded as heroes, for having opened vast new possibilities for other human beings. The fact that they got rich doing it was an incidental part of the story.

We still have people revolutionizing our lives. Just think of the computer and the pharmaceutical drugs that have not only lengthened our lives but made them more healthful, so that being 80 years old today is like being 60 years old in times past.

But today we seldom even know the names of those who have made these monumental contributions to human well-being. All we know is that some people have gotten “rich” and that this is to be regarded as some sort of grievance.

Many of the people we honor today are people who are skilled in the rhetoric of grievances and promises of new “rights” at someone else’s expense. But is that what is going to make a better America?

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the 2009 poverty guideline was $22,000 for an urban four-person family. In 2009, having income less than that, 15 percent or 40 million Americans were classified as poor, but there’s something unique about those “poor” people not seen anywhere else in the world. Robert Rector, researcher at the Heritage Foundation, presents data collected from several government sources in a report titled “How Poor Are America’s Poor? Examining the ‘Plague’ of Poverty in America” (8/27/2007):

• Forty-three percent of all poor households actually own their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage and a porch or patio.
• Eighty percent of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, in 1970, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.
• Only 6 percent of poor households are overcrowded; two-thirds have more than two rooms per person.
• The typical poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens and other cities throughout Europe. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.)
• Nearly three-quarters of poor households own a car; 31 percent own two or more cars.
• Ninety-seven percent of poor households have a color television; over half own two or more color televisions.
• Seventy-eight percent have a VCR or DVD player; 62 percent have cable or satellite TV reception.
• Eighty-nine percent own microwave ovens, more than half have a stereo, and a more than a third have an automatic dishwasher.

What’s defined as poverty is misleading in another way. Official poverty measures count just family’s cash income. It ignores additional sources of support such as the earned-income tax credit, which is a cash rebate to low-income workers; it ignores Medicaid, housing allowances, food stamps and other federal and local government subsidies to the poor. According to a report by American Enterprise Institute scholar Nicholas Eberstadt, titled “Poor Statistics,” “In 2006, according to the annual Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey, reported purchases by the poorest fifth of American households were more than twice as high as reported incomes.” That additional money might represent earnings from unreported employment, illegal activities and unreported financial assistance. A proper measure of well-being is what a person consumes rather than his income. A huge gap has emerged between income and consumption at lower income levels.

Material poverty can be measured relatively or absolutely. An absolute measure would consist of some minimum quantity of goods and services deemed adequate for a baseline level of survival. Achieving that level means that poverty has been eliminated. However, if poverty is defined as, say, the lowest one-fifth of the income distribution, it is impossible to eliminate poverty. Everyone’s income could double, triple and quadruple, but there will always be the lowest one-fifth.

Yesterday’s material poverty is all but gone. In all too many cases, it has been replaced by a more debilitating kind of poverty behavioral poverty or poverty of the spirit. This kind of poverty refers to conduct and values that prevent the development of healthy families, work ethic and self-sufficiency. The absence of these values virtually guarantees pathological lifestyles that include: drug and alcohol addiction, crime, violence, incarceration, illegitimacy, single-parent households, dependency and erosion of work ethic. Poverty of the spirit is a direct result of the perverse incentives created by some of our efforts to address material poverty.

That, it’s widely agreed, is the sad tale of Barack Obama, who has managed to demoralize liberals while inspiring a wave of gloating among conservatives. A new CNN/Opinion Research poll finds that already, most Americans want to vote him out in 2012.

But both Democrats and Republicans are jumping the gun. They forget that this storyline also describes Ronald Reagan, who saw his approval rating sink over his first 12 months — yet rebounded to carry 49 states in his 1984 re-election bid. Bill Clinton was significantly less popular than Obama for most of his initial year, and we all know how that turned out.

George W. Bush likewise managed to hack off a lot of onetime supporters soon after taking office, and when his popularity soared eight months into his term, it was not because of anything he did but because of the 9/11 attacks. He, too, won re-election.

American politicians and commentators are generally not afflicted by a deep knowledge or appreciation of history. If they were, they would not waste their time laboring to explain something that requires little explanation. They could simply state the obvious — new presidents invariably lose public esteem in the first year of their terms — and go on to try to explicate something truly mysterious, like Lady Gaga.

That’s the implication of research by Douglas Rivers, a professor of political science at Stanford University, scholar at the Hoover Institution and professional pollster. Though Obama rated the lowest of recent presidents at the end of his first year, Rivers says the pattern “is pretty much in line with what you would expect.” What we see is “more a continuing trend than an Obama phenomenon.”

That’s not to say Obama has made no mistakes. You can’t occupy the White House without disappointing a lot of people. Every president bungles some things, and every president pays a price.

His fiscal policy and health care plan, in particular, have energized the opposition and spawned public resentment. On the other hand, his grades on gay rights and immigration have actually improved — possibly because he has done less than expected on either issue. There is no real evidence to suggest that the public finds Obama far more fallible or detestable than they usually find presidents at this stage.

On health care reform, it’s not clear what he could have done differently to appease a notoriously demanding citizenry. Surveys indicate people think that if his plan passes, they will get “worse care at a higher cost,” says Rivers. What do they expect if his plan doesn’t pass? “They’ll get worse care at a higher cost.”

I wish I could say Americans’ suspicion of health care reform shows a sensible appreciation of the limits of government power and responsibility. But I suspect the real problem is they fear it will not guarantee them everything they want at someone else’s expense. Rivers notes that when you ask people about specific components of the plan, they turn out to be “fairly popular.”

If Americans distrust the government, they also take a dim view of the private sector, or parts of it. “Anything negative for insurance companies is popular,” says Rivers. Most people blame insurers for rising health care expenditures, even though insurance companies are one of the few constituencies with a powerful interest in reducing outlays.

This is not really quite the contradiction it may appear. People don’t mind when national health care costs rise. They do mind when their personal health care costs rise. When that happens, they blame health insurers. They may also blame the president, even if costs were rising before he arrived and threaten to keep rising long after he leaves.

It’s a mistake to think every political trend has deep meaning. Most of the disillusionment with Obama is the result of a natural process that tells nothing about the future. Every honeymoon ends, but the end of the honeymoon is not a harbinger of divorce.

The good news for Obama is that he has lost ground with the electorate mainly because of things he can’t control. The bad news for Obama is that making it up will require the help of things he also can’t control.

Recent videos of American children in school singing songs of praise for Barack Obama were a little much, especially for those of us old enough to remember pictures of children singing the praises of dictators like Hitler, Stalin and Mao.

But you don’t need a dictator to make you feel queasy about the manipulation of children. The mindset that sees children in school as an opportunity for teachers to impose their own notions, instead of developing the child’s ability to think for himself or herself, is a dangerous distortion of education.

Parents send their children to school to acquire the knowledge that has come down to us as a legacy of our culture– whether it is mathematics, science, or whatever– so that those children can grow up and go out into the world equipped to face life’s challenges.

Too many “educators” see teaching not as a responsibility to the students but as an opportunity for themselves– whether to indoctrinate a captive audience with the teacher’s ideology, manipulate them in social experiments or just do fun things that make teaching easier, whether or not it really educates the child.

You can, of course, call anything that happens in a classroom “education”– but that does not make it education, except in the eyes of those who cannot think beyond words. Unfortunately, the dumbed-down education of previous generations means that many parents today see nothing wrong with their children being manipulated in school, instead of being educated.

Such parents may see nothing wrong with spending precious time in classrooms chit-chatting about how everyone “feels” about things on television or in their personal life.

But while our children are frittering away time on trivia, other children in other countries are acquiring the skills in math, science or other fields that will allow them to take the jobs our children will need when they grow up. Foreigners can take those jobs either by coming to America and outperforming Americans or by having those jobs outsourced to them overseas.

In short, schools are supposed to prepare children for the future, not give teachers opportunities for self-indulgences in the present. One of these self-indulgences was exemplified by a letter I received recently from a fifth-grader in the Sayre Elementary School in Lyon, Michigan.

He said, “I have been assigned to ask a famous person a question about how he or she would solve a difficult problem.” The problem was what to do about the economy.

Instead, I replied to his parents: With American students consistently scoring near or at the bottom in international tests, I am repeatedly appalled by teachers who waste their students’ time by assigning them to write to strangers, chosen only because those strangers’ names have appeared in the media.

It is of course much easier– and more “exciting,” to use a word too many educators use– to do cute little stuff like this than to take on the sober responsibility to develop in students both the knowledge and the ability to think that will enable them to form their own views on matters in both public and private life. What earthly good would it do your son to know what economic policies I think should be followed, especially since what I think should be done will not have the slightest effect on what the government will in fact do? And why should a fifth-grader be expected to deal with such questions that people with Ph.D.’s in economics have trouble wrestling with?

The damage does not end with wasting students’ time and misdirecting their energies, serious though these things are. Getting students used to looking to so-called “famous” people for answers is the antithesis of education as a preparation for making up one’s own mind as citizens of a democracy, rather than as followers of “leaders.”

Nearly two hundred years ago, the great economist David Ricardo said: “I wish that I may never think the smiles of the great and powerful a sufficient inducement to turn aside from the straight path of honesty and the convictions of my own mind.”

The fad of assigning students to write to strangers is an irresponsible self-indulgence of teachers who should be teaching. But that practice will not end until enough parents complain to enough principals and enough elected officials to make it end.