Hounding Obama 6 – Failing, and should be

By hook or crook. The Obama government will take over the financial companies. When the ruse of “outrage” over the contractual bonuses at AIG collapsed, the CEOs of the biggest banks were called in for a private meeting with the president. No doubt he made it crystal clear that they were in charge…er, that socialism would win the day.

Socialism has been proven a failure. It has been soundly refuted in theory by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. It has been proven a failure in practice all around the world, in Russia, Romania, Yougoslavia, Cuba, and it is even being abandoned by China.

President Obama’s policies are a mixture of socialism and pragmatism. If it were said that he is simply a socialist, that would paint him as far more principled than he is. He is a pragmatist above all, with a preference for the failed policies of socialism as espoused by John Maynard Keynes.

However, the pragmatism of Obama ends up being simply socialism after all. His claim, in the face of reality, is that he is just repeating what worked for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. What worked?

The problem is that all Roosevelt did was to worsen and prolong the Great Depression that Herbert Hoover began. They are dead wrong, those who attribute that Depression to a false boom fed by monetary easing in the 1920s by the Federal Reserve and that the only problem in the 1929 to 1932 time period was the Fed’s monetary tightening. They are wrong in holding that the Depression was cured by keeping wages high, by bank holidays, by massive public works spending, and finally ended by war.

The stock market had already started going into correction before October 1929. The monetary tightening speeded that up. The major trigger was the news just days before October 28 that the last obstacles holding up the Smoot-Hawley Tariff act were gone, and that passage was now certain (even though the act did not become law until the next summer). The enactment of that Act, together with retaliation from abroad, brought world trade to a standstill.

Obama’s policies are failed policies. They were tried before. They failed before.
I should certainly want them to remain failed policies, and want them to fail. I want them to not even get out of the gate. I want Obama to fail.

If he does not, this recession will get worse, as we find out it is more costly than we expected and that the ills of the recession are not really getting cured.

All of us deserve something. Some will nevertheless end up with just their native body and mind they were born with, with nothing to show for it. There are two ways to get and deserve what you want.

There is the economic way and there is the political way. One way is the old-fashioned way: work to earn it. The other way is to steal or print money. The one way is the economic way, the other is the political way.

The economic way

The economic way does not involve coercion, but rather division of labor and trade. It is the natural way of work, expending effort and using one’s brains, one’s reason to tame nature, to claim land, to develop it, to use its resources to create what life as a human being requires. To be able to use one’s reason and other talents requires that you are free to make your own choices about how to use the scarce resources at your disposal.

Throughout our country we will find people in that situation. Each person or each household has certain scarce resources. Each has information about how best to use them, and their own intentions, plans or projects using those resources, in order to survive and flourish. They are all different.

There is no one grand national project to which we all dedicate our efforts and time. There are over three hundred million such projects.

No single person or group of a few people gathered in Washington DC share the knowledge that all of these people have. No such person can possibly accomplish the success of all of these projects. There are hundreds of millions little and big projects. We all accept that some will succeed, some will do so exceedingly well, but some will fail. Walt Disney failed almost 100 times before he struck it rich.

Along the way, charities develop to help those who fail and have nothing left with which to start over. Private charities as they operated before the welfare state started taking over was private. It was personal. Donors engaged in dialogue with recipient. Charity placed demands on the recipient to do more for themselves, which avoided a growing dependence.

Welfare and socialist systems treat the goods and services as a national pool and the recipients as a homogeneous group that must be treated evenly, without imposing tailor-made advice. Means tests create incentives to drop one’s income to pass and remain within the system, creating dependence. No pride of self-improvement will develop from that. Anyone who genuinely cared for the poor should be horrified by such accomplishments.

The political way

On the other hand, if you don’t want to work to earn a living, you lose your job and live on welfare, you sleep under bridges and panhandle, you resort to getting government subsidies, laws that protect your field of business such as licensing laws or tariffs that raise the price of imported products, you get scholarships and loans to go to college, graduate school and become a professor teaching “liberal” political science. If you don’t want to make an honest living you become dependent on others or turn to a life of crime.

You do not invent or create a single new thing all your life, but somehow acquire the product of other people and use them to procure more.

You plead with people all around you to be kind and merciful. You fling in their faces the grimy facts of your childhood abuse, the lack of books in your home when you were young, you enlist the sympathy of everyone for your lack of a father figure, your skin color, your having dropped out of school, your cruel boss who fired you.

Obama’s plan

Now picture the Obama and Biden Agenda implemented. You have chosen which way you want to make your living. Everyone has decided.

Those who chose to work, to use reason to make a living will face regulations the likes of which the world has not seen. You will be volunteered, taxed and loaded with debt. The deficit spending will had more and more to the national debt, to the total unfunded commitments of the government. The total will exceed $66 trillion, plus your own self-imposed debts, will be a sum so huge that each household’s part will be hundreds of thousands of dollars – which you will never be able to pay off.

If social security had not already been shown to threaten bankruptcy of the whole ecomony, then the trillions of bank bailouts will. However, another evil force is at work also: medical care. If Obama creates a single payer system or a system that controls what doctors may or may not do and what they may charge, demand for medical care will sky-rocket. Waiting lines or lists will be created and grow to incredible lengths. Patients will heal on their own or die before their appointments come. There will also be fewer doctors, as they will have more and more restraints imposed on what they may do and what they can charge.

Obama’s socialist system would be a dream for those who choose the political way to making a living.

This is a plan that cannot succeed.

This is a plan that I want to fail, or to not even get started.