"The technologies of the industrial revolution favored centralization", writes economist Arnold Kling, "while the technologies of the information revolution shift the balance somewhat more toward decentralization." Those 22 carefully qualified words sum up the changes in America I have observed since I was growing up in Detroit in the 1950s. And they provide a basis for opposing the proposition that Barack Obama deserves re-election.

As president, Mr Obama has advanced, with varying success, policies producing greater centralisation at the expense of market actors and state and local governments. His health-care bill, passed despite public disapproval, centralises control of one-sixth of the American economy. The Dodd–Frank bill locks in too-big-to-fail status for the largest financial institutions and gives them the same kind of advantage over smaller units that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had over other mortgage securitisers—not a happy precedent. The cap-and-trade bill Mr Obama sought also combined centralised decision-making with sectoral deal-making. Thankfully, it did not pass.

It is becoming apparent that these laws were shoddily drafted, not because the drafters were stupid but because they undertook a task that, as Friedrich Hayek taught, was impossible. Even the wisest legislator cannot avoid adverse unintended consequences when regulating activities so complex and involving so many people. Nor can he avoid stifling innovation and locking in current practices. In an information age, the wise way to regulate is to set clear and readily enforceable rules, and let market participants adapt and innovate. This is not Mr Obama's way.

The president's policies are also objectionable as crony capitalism. Mr Obama's vision of America is evidently one in which the leaders of a few large organisations get together around a table and make decisions for a populace deemed too dim to look out for themselves. That is how things worked in Detroit in the 1950s, with the Big Three car companies, the United Auto Workers, the local utilities, and the city and state governments making decisions for everyone else. It seemed to work in the industrial age but foundered as the information revolution got started. Anyone who visits Detroit and Hiroshima today will wonder which side won the war.

Then there is macroeconomic policy. Mr Obama's supporters argue, plausibly, that he inherited a bad economy that was in danger of implosion. His detractors argue, just as plausibly, that his policies have resulted in a sluggish recovery at best. The stimulus package of 2009 was another shoddy piece of work. One-third of its funds were directed at state and local governments, in large part a pay-off for the campaign contributions of public-employee unions. Mr Obama was surprised, he said later, to find there were no shovel-ready projects, but anyone familiar with America's regulatory regime would have known better. Vast tranches of stimulus funds were used to subsidise solar-panel manufacturing firms, most connected to Democratic fund-raisers. Much of that money, like the $535m Solyndra loan guarantee, vanished or seems likely to soon.

Mr Obama's greatest failure is his refusal to confront America's long-term fiscal problems. He has boosted spending to some 25% of GDP from its long-time ceiling of 21%, and is proposing to continue that far into the future. His Ahab-like pursuit of higher tax rates on high earners ignores the fact that America's tax system is, by some measures, already more progressive than those of other advanced countries. The potential exists for bipartisan tax reform, reducing rates and eliminating preferences, but Mr Obama is not interested. He seems determined to get that white whale even if (as he said during the 2008 campaign) higher rates actually produce less revenue for the government, and even as Democrats such as Bill Clinton and Larry Summers say it would be foolish to raise tax rates in a sluggish economy.

America needs to reform its industrial-age entitlement programmes, especially Medicare, to better suit our information-age society. Entitlements are on a trajectory to gobble up all federal revenues and more, and their centralised command and control design leaves no options but death panels and default. Unfortunately, Mr Obama has shown no serious interest in entitlement reform. He ignored the recommendations of his own Bowles–Simpson commission and sabotaged the "grand bargain" negotiations by suddenly demanding $400 billion more in tax increases. He has responded to Republican proposals such as Paul Ryan's budget plan with campaign demagoguery of the crudest sort.

This is not what Mr Obama seemed to promise during his 2008 presidential campaign. He talked of the need for civility and bipartisan comity. But there has been little of this from Mr Obama, and more denunciations of a presidential predecessor than America has seen in 60 years. He depicts the George W. Bush years as a period of unregulated exploitive capitalism, a caricature that cannot stand serious scrutiny. As an unreconstructed defender of an unsustainable mid-20th-century welfare state, perhaps he can think of no other response. It is not a performance worthy of re-election.