America’s misfortune is nothing if not Obamanomics
-The Washington Times
Illustration: Bad luck by Alexander Hunter for The Washington Times
“We had reversed the recession, avoided a depression, gotten the economy moving again,” President Obama fantasized on the campaign stump in Iowa. “But over the last six months, we’ve had a run of bad luck.”
Mr. Obama, meet the late Robert A. Heinlein, a Naval Academy midshipman-turned-influential-author, who decades before you entered the Oval Office presciently described your administration. It was Heinlein who penned one of the most insightful observations ever of human nature:
“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded - here and there, now and then - are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as ‘bad luck.’ “
Mr. President, you didn’t run into bad luck. You created it.
America is indeed blessed, but it’s not by some accident that previous generations were able to create the most prosperous nation in the history of humankind. Our founding principles of constitutionally limited government, individual liberty and free-market capitalism have unleashed the powerful American engine of prosperity. This engine is fueled by individual players’ investments of labor and capital, and both are supplied directly in proportion to their confidence of realizing reward.
Americans will have enough confidence to invest themselves in our economy only when the basic tenets of the free market are observed. Chief among them is private property, the guarantee that the government will not seize a citizen’s belongings through confiscatory taxation or other means. Consumer sovereignty is the individual’s right to freely use his purchasing power, which in turn signals to suppliers what and how much to produce. Fair competition is the even playing field where all Americans play by the same rules and are judged by the same standards.
Parenthetically, I apologize to those of you who consider these basic tenets of capitalism - and therefore, the basic tenets of America’s historical success itself - to be elementary. I’ve included them here only because some prominent educators, such as Saul Alinsky, Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, evidently have failed to instruct their star pupil of these undeniable fundamentals of America.
The Japanese tsunami, the “Arab Spring” uprisings and Europe’s debt crises are not America’s “bad luck” - Obamanomics is.
The Obama presidency is a case study of what happens when you break faith with the principles that made America great. Mr. Obama has chased investment capital out of the market by implementing the Dodd-Frank financial-sector takeover. He has frozen new hiring by unleashing Obamacare’s enormous costs on employment.
He has trampled the rights of Americans as free consumers with the unconstitutional individual mandate to purchase government-sanctioned health insurance. He has made a mockery of free competition by granting Obamacare waivers to cronies and union friends. He has stymied the technology sector by unleashing his antitrust forces and the manufacturing sector by unleashing his labor-relations forces.
He has ushered in the first-ever downgrade of America’s credit rating by rejecting the Cut, Cap and Balance Act. And he has all but assured that those Americans with capital will stay on the sidelines by maligning them and launching class warfare upon them.
Heinlein, like most thinking Americans, would not call this “bad luck.”
Dr. Milton R. Wolf is a board-certified diagnostic radiologist and a cousin of President Obama‘s. He blogs at MiltonWolf.com
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