[Swiftwater Gazette] Change You Can Believe In

[Eric Sandberg]

Brad,

Yep, "nailed it" alright. That's pretty much my feeling in a nutshell.

Trickle up poverty, the new vision for America.

Rik

On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 9:43 AM, Brad Haslett <flybrad at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dr. Hanson nails it!
>
> ---------------
>
> Obama and ‘Redistributive Change’
> Forget the recession and the “uninsured.” Obama has bigger fish to fry.
>
> By Victor Davis Hanson
>
> The first seven months of the Obama administration seemingly make no
> sense. Why squander public approval by running up astronomical
> deficits in a time of pre-existing staggering national debt?
>
> Why polarize opponents after promising bipartisan transcendence?
>
> Why create vast new programs when the efficacy of big government is
> already seen as dubious?
>
> But that is exactly the wrong way to look at these first seven months
> of Obamist policy-making.
>
> Take increased federal spending and the growing government absorption
> of GDP. Given the resiliency of the U.S. economy, it would have been
> easy to ride out the recession. In that case we would still have had
> to deal with a burgeoning and unsustainable annual federal deficit
> that would have approached $1 trillion.
>
> Instead, Obama may nearly double that amount of annual indebtedness
> with more federal stimuli and bailouts, newly envisioned cap-and-trade
> legislation, and a variety of fresh entitlements. Was that fiscally
> irresponsible? Yes, of course.
>
> But I think the key was not so much the spending excess or new
> entitlements. The point instead was the consequence of the resulting
> deficits, which will require radically new taxation for generations.
> If on April 15 the federal and state governments, local entities, the
> Social Security system, and the new health-care programs can claim 70
> percent of the income of the top 5 percent of taxpayers, then that is
> considered a public good — every bit as valuable as funding new
> programs, and one worth risking insolvency.
>
> Individual compensation is now seen as arbitrary and, by extension,
> inherently unfair. A high income is now rationalized as having less to
> do with market-driven needs, acquired skills, a higher level of
> education, innate intelligence, inheritance, hard work, or accepting
> risk. Rather income is seen more as luck-driven, cruelly capricious,
> unfair — even immoral, in that some are rewarded arbitrarily on the
> basis of race, class, and gender advantages, others for their
> overweening greed and ambition, and still more for their
> quasi-criminality.
>
> “Patriotic” federal healers must then step in to “spread the wealth.”
> Through redistributive tax rates, they can “treat” the illness that
> the private sector has caused. After all, there is no intrinsic reason
> why an auto fabricator makes $60 in hourly wages and benefits, while a
> young investment banker finagles $500.
>
> Or, in the president’s own language, the government must equalize the
> circumstances of the “waitress” with those of the “lucky.” It is thus
> a fitting and proper role of the new federal government to rectify
> imbalances of compensation — at least for those outside the anointed
> Guardian class. In a 2001 interview Obama in fact outlined the
> desirable political circumstances that would lead government to
> enforce equality of results when he elaborated on what he called an
> “actual coalition of powers through which you bring about
> redistributive change.”
>
> Still, why would intelligent politicians try to ram through, in mere
> weeks, a thousand pages of health-care gibberish — its details
> outsourced to far-left elements in the Congress (and their staffers) —
> that few in the cabinet had ever read or even knew much about?
>
> Once again, I don’t think health care per se was ever really the
> issue. When pressed, no one in the administration seemed to know
> whether illegal aliens were covered. Few cared why young people do not
> divert some of their entertainment expenditures to a modest investment
> in private catastrophic coverage.
>
> Warnings that Canadians already have their health care rationed, wait
> in long lines, and are denied timely and critical procedures also did
> not seem to matter. And no attention was paid to statistics suggesting
> that, if we exclude homicides and auto accidents, Americans live as
> long on average as anyone in the industrial world, and have better
> chances of surviving longer with heart disease and cancer. That the
> average American did not wish to radically alter his existing plan,
> and that he understood that the uninsured really did have access to
> health care, albeit in a wasteful manner at the emergency room, was
> likewise of no concern.
>
> The issue again was larger, and involved a vast reinterpretation of
> how America receives health care.  Whether more or fewer Americans
> would get better or worse access and cheaper or more expensive care,
> or whether the government can or cannot afford such new entitlements,
> oddly seemed largely secondary to the crux of the debate.
>
> Instead, the notion that the state will assume control, in Canada-like
> fashion, and level the health-care playing field was the real concern.
> “They” (the few) will now have the same care as “we” (the many).
> Whether the result is worse or better for everyone involved is
> extraneous, since sameness is the overarching principle.
>
> We can discern this same mandated egalitarianism beneath many of the
> administration’s recent policy initiatives. Obama is not a pragmatist,
> as he insisted, nor even a liberal, as charged.
>
> Rather, he is a statist. The president believes that a select group of
> affluent, highly educated technocrats — cosmopolitan, noble-minded,
> and properly progressive — supported by a phalanx of whiz-kids fresh
> out of blue-chip universities with little or no experience in the
> marketplace, can direct our lives far better than we can ourselves. By
> “better” I do not mean in a fashion that, measured by disinterested
> criteria, makes us necessarily wealthier, happier, more productive, or
> freer.
>
> Instead, “better” means “fairer,” or more “equal.” We may “make”
> different amounts of money, but we will end up with more or less
> similar net incomes. We may know friendly doctors, be aware of the
> latest procedures, and have the capital to buy blue-chip health
> insurance, but no matter. Now we will all alike queue up with our
> government-issued insurance cards to wait our turn at the ubiquitous
> corner clinic.
>
> None of this equality-of-results thinking is new.
>
> When radical leaders over the last 2,500 years have sought to enforce
> equality of results, their prescriptions were usually predictable:
> redistribution of property; cancellation of debts; incentives to bring
> out the vote and increase political participation among the poor;
> stigmatizing of the wealthy, whether through the extreme measure of
> ostracism or the more mundane forced liturgies; use of the court
> system to even the playing field by targeting the more prominent
> citizens; radical growth in government and government employment; the
> use of state employees as defenders of the egalitarian faith;
> bread-and-circus entitlements; inflation of the currency and greater
> national debt to lessen the power of accumulated capital; and radical
> sloganeering about reactionary enemies of the new state.
>
> The modern versions of much of the above already seem to be guiding
> the Obama administration — evident each time we hear of another
> proposal to make it easier to renounce personal debt; federal action
> to curtail property or water rights; efforts to make voter
> registration and vote casting easier; radically higher taxes on the
> top 5 percent; takeover of private business; expansion of the federal
> government and an increase in government employees; or massive
> inflationary borrowing. The current class-warfare “them/us” rhetoric
> was predictable.
>
> Usually such ideologies do not take hold in America, given its
> tradition of liberty, frontier self-reliance, and emphasis on personal
> freedom rather than mandated fraternity and egalitarianism. At times,
> however, the stars line up, when a national catastrophe, like war or
> depression, coincides with the appearance of an unusually gifted,
> highly polished, and eloquent populist. But the anointed one must be
> savvy enough to run first as a centrist in order later to govern as a
> statist.
>
> Given the September 2008 financial meltdown, the unhappiness over the
> war, the ongoing recession, and Barack Obama’s postracial claims and
> singular hope-and-change rhetoric, we found ourselves in just such a
> situation. For one of the rare times in American history, statism
> could take hold, and the country could be pushed far to the left.
>
> That goal is the touchstone that explains the seemingly inexplicable —
> and explains also why, when Obama is losing independents, conservative
> Democrats, and moderate Republicans, his anxious base nevertheless
> keeps pushing him to become even more partisan, more left-wing,
> angrier, and more in a hurry to rush things through. They understand
> the unpopularity of the agenda and the brief shelf life of the
> president’s charm. One term may be enough to establish lasting
> institutional change.
>
> Obama and his supporters at times are quite candid about such a
> radical spread-the-wealth agenda, voiced best by Rahm Emanuel — “You
> don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste; it’s an opportunity to do
> important things that you would otherwise avoid” — or more casually by
> Obama himself — “My attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks
> from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody. I think when you
> spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”
>
> So we move at breakneck speed in order not to miss this rare
> opportunity when the radical leadership of the Congress and the White
> House for a brief moment clinch the reins of power. By the time a
> shell-shocked public wakes up and realizes that the prescribed
> chemotherapy is far worse than the existing illness, it should be too
> late to revive the old-style American patient.
>
> — NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover
> Institution.
>
> — Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and
> a recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal. © 2009 Tribune
> Media Services, Inc.
>
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-- 
How long will it be before the public gets tired of the little know-it-all
sermonettes by Barack Obama — especially since nothing that he is doing is
actually working? .... Thomas Sowell
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