Contributed by: filbert Thursday, August 27 2009 @ 02:31 PM CST
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.
All of this should be obvious to anyone who’s been paying attention to what Obama has actually done rather than just listening to what he says.
What Obama says sounds pretty good, as long as you don’t examine it too closely and discover that he really hasn’t said anything at all, but he’s said it very prettily.
What Obama does marks him as a statist, a re-distributionist.
He’s a slave owner-wannabe.
Before you recoil in horror, I would observe that most of the slaves that were brought over to the U.S. from Africa were sold into the trans-Atlantic slave trade by other blacks, or by Arabs, or by other “people of color.” So don’t even start about how white people are somehow uniquely racist, because that’s just bull$hit.