By Dan Ferris in Extreme Value:

With friends like Andy Grove and Charlie Munger, who needs enemies?

Both Munger (vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway) and Grove (a former CEO at Intel and now a senior advisor) have recently expressed views on the U.S. economy. Munger's piece was published by Slate, and Grove's piece showed up in a recent issue of Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Both wealthy, successful businessmen arrived at the same conclusion: More government is the answer.

Grove says the government needs to be more "job-centric," and Munger says the trading of financial derivatives should be outlawed.

That's the best these geniuses can do? Pushed to the wall, pressed for a solution, when they've got all the world's eyeballs looking to them for guidance, the captains of industry, the men who sit atop two of the most successful business enterprises in history... all they can say is, "We need more government," or in Munger's case, "There ought to be a law"?

Is this some kind of joke, played on the world's middle class and poor by the billionaires? If so, I'm not laughing.

Both Munger and Grove start out sounding quite reasonable. But as soon as they start talking about free markets, their arguments fall apart.

Grove says we're wrong to assume tech startups create American tech jobs. He then makes a reasonable argument that scaling up successful new technologies creates tech jobs. Grove says the United States is losing its ability to scale up manufacturing capability to produce new technologies.

He says we're losing something valuable by sending that scaling process overseas. It makes sense.

But Grove never mentions the sense of entitlement among American factory workers created by companies like GM, nor the horrible consequences it creates. He never says we've priced ourselves out of the race. Instead, Grove says the government's No. 1 priority should be job creation. He says we need a new tax on the product of offshore labor, with the proceeds used to rebuild "the industrial commons." Says Grove, "If what I'm suggesting sounds protectionist, so be it."

Munger says a few things that make sense, too. He says the United States financial system has become a casino. Check. He implies we shouldn't have social welfare beyond a strong family-oriented cultural tendency and private charities. Check. He describes a simple tax system and seems skeptical of schemes to redistribute income. Check.

Then, he says to prevent future economic problems, all we have to do is outlaw financial derivatives trading. It's comical when Munger says economists went wrong by not heeding the advice of Keynes, who famously promoted a monetary policy that encourages a casino-like view of financial markets.

If you want to be heard on this topic, you must include a huge role for government in your suggestions on how to solve the economic crisis or improve the economy. If you don't do that, you're not taken seriously.

We get a lot of complaints at S&A about being too political. But it's virtually impossible to do your job as an investor without paying attention to politics. Can you really invest in the automobile industry without considering that the U.S. government owns most of Chrysler and GM? Can you really be an investor in the mortgage industry without knowing about Fannie, Freddie, the Fed, and the FDIC, to name only a few of the dozens of government agencies that influence that industry?

I don't see how you can separate investing from politics in the year 2010. Those who try will get slaughtered like pigs in the next few years. And if you expect much worthwhile guidance about economics and politics from captains of industry, you're wasting your time more often than not, as the examples of Munger and Grove suggest.

As an investor, you need to find ways to get paid by the government. Finding an overcapitalized company that gushes free cash flow doesn't hurt, either.

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