Barack Obama, Clinton's chief rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, talks a lot about "investment" but not in the way that it is used in the real world.

Obama would also raise the top tax rate on the wealthiest Americans to nearly 40 percent from 35 percent and boost taxes on corporations, capital gains and dividends.

"He doesn't favor giving special tax incentives for oil companies and for other corporations," said Austan Goolsbee, an Obama economic adviser at the University of Chicago.

Instead, he would "invest" this money in long-term growth, Goolsbee told me. "He is for programs that are about investing in science and technology, improving work skills, investing in alternative energy and transition from school to work programs."

This raises the question about who is the better investor. Who can peer into the future and know what are the technological innovations that will create new and as yet unseen markets and produce tomorrow's jobs -- Obama or the free market?

The Illinois senator has no background in investment, and no experience or record in the picking the technological advances that have made U.S. firms like Intel, Apple and Microsoft the most successful high-tech corporations on the planet.

The free market provided the venture capital that turned these and other successful start-up businesses into major job-creating machines, making the United States the richest and most successful economy in the world.

And who provided the capital investment that built them? That's right, the millions of investors that Clinton and Obama want to tax more so that they and a bunch of bureaucrats will be the ones to decide how that money should be spent instead of invested.

Not too long ago, Clinton said, "I've got a lot of ideas" how to grow the government. So does Obama. One of the first things he would do as president is to raise the federal minimum wage each year, every year. What he doesn't understand is that he would be pricing entry-level jobs out of existence as businesses find less labor-intensive ways to deliver the same product or service at a lower cost.

Go to a local supermarket and look at all those self-service checkout registers and you'll see what I mean.