The following commentary comes from an independent investor or market observer as part of TheStreet's guest contributor program, which is separate from the company's news coverage.

NEW YORK (

TheStreet

) -- Rick Santorum's assertion that President Obama's agenda is not about the quality of life or jobs but "some phony ideal. Some phony theology" may not be an appropriate characterization of his religious views.

However, it is an accurate description of what is wrong with the hard left in American politics and the thinking that drives domestic policy in the Obama administration.

Too often liberal policies are based more on faith than reason. Often they're premised on assertions that have little foundation in facts or modern economics.

Consequently, the president advocates or imposes solutions that make the nation's problems worse, and when confronted with disappointing results he often tells us what he believes, without offering the data and logic that brought him to those conclusions.

Regarding the financial crisis, the President assigns blame to the lack of regulation. The facts are that banks got into trouble making loans on real estate assigned inflated values to borrowers who could not repay.

Loans were bundled into bonds and sold to investors. When not enough unwitting fools bought bonds, the big Wall Street banks put unsold securities into offshore special investment vehicles (SIVs), whose potential losses were not supposed to be a claim on bank capital.

Other firms, like

AIG

(AIG) - Get Report

, sold insurance to against potential losses on bonds without sufficient assets to back up that protection.

When the loans and bonds failed, it turned out those SIVs were indeed a drain on bank capital, and

Citigroup

(C) - Get Report

, AIG and others needed bailouts to avoid the complete collapse of bank credit available to the economy.

All this was a massive accounting fraud, something big public accounting firms were supposed to catch in audits of banks but didn't -- a failure Sarbanes-Oxley regulations, passed in 2002, were supposed to avert.

The solution imposed by Dodd-Frank is to ban propriety securities trading by banks and impose burdensome lending regulations on surviving community and regional banks, who were more victims of the bubble than malefactors in the crisis.

Proprietary trading had little to do with instigating the mess, and profits from trading actually helped big banks rebuild balance sheets more quickly.

And now onerous regulations have hamstrung community and regional banks and are forcing them to seek buyouts by larger Wall Street banks, the very ones that caused the crisis and have little interest in lending to the small and medium-sized businesses that create jobs.

When faced with resulting problems, the President explains he is saving the country from unstable growth of decades past. Yet, economists of all stripes refer to the 20 years prior to the crisis as the "Great Moderation," owing to exceptional stability in economic activity and employment never before experienced in U.S. history.

President Obama persistently preaches that solar, wind and other alternative technologies will make America energy independent and sustain economic superpower status.

Yet any reasonable reading of the prospective economic viability of these technologies, and assessment of the likely transition of the automobile industry to hybrids and electrics, indicates the nation will remain significantly dependent on petroleum for at least the next two decades.

And with oil above $100 a barrel handicapping the U.S. economy, the President imposes regulations that all but shut down deepwater drilling in the Gulf and other offshore locations where the real potential for new American oil supplies lie. Instead, he plows money into projects like

Solyndra

that independent financial analysts predicted would likely fail.

Americans pay at least 50% more than Europeans for health care, often with less satisfactory outcomes, because the federal government pays for more than half of health care, but does not impose price and access controls as effectively as those in Europe.

Obamacare simply doesn't fix what's broke, but instead raises taxes to provide more subsidies and imposes more mandates on businesses. Any economist will tell you subsidies and mandates to purchase a product raise its price -- health care is no exception.

When critics opposed Obamacare, former President Carter called them racists, and he was not alone in spewing such venom.

Among intellectuals, media personalities and senior policymakers that form the priesthood of the left, conservatives are not merely wrong but evil.

Beliefs over facts, assertions in place of reason, vilification of opponents -- that looks a lot like religion -- the worst kind.

Professor Peter Morici, of the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, is a recognized expert on economic policy and international economics. Prior to joining the university, he served as director of the Office of Economics at the U.S. International Trade Commission. He is the author of 18 books and monographs and has published widely in leading public policy and business journals, including the Harvard Business Review and Foreign Policy. Morici has lectured and offered executive programs at more than 100 institutions, including Columbia University, the Harvard Business School and Oxford University. His views are frequently featured on CNN, CBS, BBC, FOX, ABC, CNBC, NPR, NPB and national broadcast networks around the world.