President-elect Obama took a law degree from Harvard, helped create legislation on electoral fraud, taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago and touts energy independence and the American military’s with­drawal from Iraq as national priorities. While all that sounds pretty good to me, it doesn’t convey a sense of Obama’s experience in the business world. As he prepares to assume the country’s highest office, Obama appears credentially unfit to wrestle with an economy that’s leaking like my car’s engine and features the world’s largest national debt. Even amid his singular idiocy as a leader, the outgoing President Bush at least has a Harvard MBA. Then again, the American economy — or at least the street-level part of it — has a way of rebounding in the course of domestic affairs. After all, the stock market boom of the mid- and late 1990s was due to fluctuations in man­power, the spread of technical ex­pertise and a better-educated workforce, not just because Bill Clinton was in office. Our elected officials have far less effect on consumerism than they think. Government can’t im­pose sanctions on the rank and file’s spending habits any more than it can legislate morality. What it can do is simply get out of the way. That’s what Scottish econo­mist Adam Smith recommended in his 1795 essay “The History of Astronomy,” which features the concept of the “invisible hand” — ­merchants fuel the best consumerism by looking out for their own interests, and each sector thus helps grow the other as if guided by a hand no one can see. (It’s said the hand he was talking about was the Hand of God, but that’s a topic for another place.) To hear the media tell it, no such hand is anywhere in sight in the public or private sectors (see this month’s “Life in the City” on page 9 for some related thoughts). Mortgages are being foreclosed at record rates; retirement savings are drying up like puddles under the San Diego sun. Yeah, banks are starting to lend to each other a little, but that thaw in credit restrictions is the byproduct of a $700 billion government bailout of faltering financial institutions and toxic mortgages. Seven-hundred billion dollar bills would stretch to Mars and back nearly 40 times — but try to imagine 700 billion individ­ual items beyond that tidy concept. You can’t. Neither can I, Barack Obama or John McCain, nor could Adam Smith. Such lofty numbers do not trickle down into street-level commerce, because their cash-reserve equivalent simply doesn’t exist. The folding money in your wallet is the only real indicator of the nation’s fiscal health, which means that the American economy is only as robust or as paltry as the next guy’s disposable income. If you’ve got an extra 20 on you, so much the better. Despite these wholly difficult times, many people do. Part of that bill will get you the gas you need to get home tonight; the other will rent you a DVD and buy you the dinner you’ll eat while you watch it. As you enjoy your evening, rest as­sured that the government is talking about a completely different entity when it refers to the economic crisis — a crisis whose impact, at least for now, is as much psychological as financial. I voted for Barack Obama, and I’m glad I did. His talk of energy independence and our withdrawal from Iraq, where we’re waging an illegal and absurdly stupid war, is music to my admittedly leftist ears. He makes sense on these items largely because demonstrable action accompanies his positions — the public and private sectors are slowly embracing greener lifestyles, and 70 percent of the population opposes our military presence in Iraq. The economy? That’s a different matter. It’s downright ethereal, it is, because its workings are inherently private (only you and the guy who bags your groceries know what you bought on your latest shopping trip, and he’s forgotten your order once you step away from the aisle). While I congratulate the president-elect on his victory and marvel at his meteoric rise to the national stage, I’d ask that he rein in his rhetoric on the economic fixes that matter. Political posturing on the topic may threaten to turn the Obama White House into the propaganda machine it seeks to eschew. Don’t let the buzz scare you into submission, even as a few random pieces of green and white paper flutter onto a distant Martian outpost.