Obama’s War on the Productive

Victor Davis Hanson wrote a good article called The War Against the Producers in which he discusses the overall Obama Agenda: a war on the productive members of our society.

He refers to their larger agenda as:

Note here I mean something quite different from the accustomed notion of “accomplish.” You see, I think the point was never much to build more bike paths on borrowed money or just bail out GM, but rather more to reengineer the tax code, as part of a grander vision of creating a new equality of result in America.

Soon we will all end up after each April 15 about making the same, driving the same sort of cars and using the same sort of mass transit, living in about the same sorts of houses, and having about the same sorts of “‘they’ will take care of it for me” philosophies — all overseen by brilliant, but highly ranked and exempt Platonic Guardians who suffer on our behalf as they jet and limo at breakneck speed ensuring our welfare.

This reminds me of a timeless quote from Winston Churchill: “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.”  Churchill nailed it with that one.  I submit that when a socialistic system is implemented only the biggest losers (and their statist masters) in the society benefit.  All of the people whose hard earned tax dollars subsidize the lifestyles of the losers and their statist ‘benefactors’ take a hit so that we can arrive at that “equal sharing of misery”.  It is simply morally bankrupt to subscribe to an ideology that seeks to knock everyone down to the level that helps the losers the most.

Hanson goes on to outline the likely thinking of a hard working electrician when faced with the increasing burden of Obama’s deficit spending:

“I made $412,000 last year due to Saturday jobs, overtime, risky bidding, gambles on new equipment, and new lines of credit, but under Obama I will pay maybe $50-80,000 more of my income to the government. In other words the cost of, say, hiring two more entry-level electricians, or the cost of outfitting an entire new van with boom and equipment, or what I cleared every Saturday last year — all that will go to the government.”

In other words, why work harder when the government is simply going to seize it?  If that does not make sense to you then you are likely not the sort of person who works 70-80 hour weeks to better your financial position and you probably voted for the vacuous Candidate Obama anyway.  How’s that Kool-Aid tasting now, comrade?

It never ceases to amaze me how politicians, particularly those blinded by a collectivist ideology, never accept the Law of Unintended Consequences.  President Urkel’s coming massive tax increases will modify behavior:

And that means rippling throughout this key sector of the economy — even before these taxes have been enacted — are hesitation, stasis, and ultimately constriction — at first for psychological reasons, soon confirmed by the actual facts of less money. In short, very bright people will be thinking how to hide income, how to barter, how to slow down and not produce goods and services, rather than blast full speed ahead and enrich angry others.

Why would I work harder if it just means that a statist jerk like Pelosi or Obama can buy vote from losers with my money?  Galt’s Gulch is starting to look more and more attractive.  Of course, Obama would send in his brown shirts if there were such a statist-free place to find refuge.

His final observations hit the nail on the head and even partially explain why the elite republicans despise Sarah Palin:

Final observations: Obama brilliantly conflated the Wall Street class with the upper-tier of Main Street in Animal Farm fashion: the former gets lectured, but stays enriched through bailouts; the latter takes both the moral hit for the former’s crimes and greed and the actual hit in higher taxes.(Nota bene: the new Democrats, in Prince Charles fashion, like the taste and culture of the hyper-rich, who care little about taxes, are sensitive behind their ramparts to the less well off, and know high-culture (think Streisand, Gates, Soros, the Georgetown/Hollwood/Silicon Valley, Upper East Side, Cambridge, Mass, set). These aristoi despise the wheeler-dealer, always on the move, uppity, wanna-get-rich scrambler that is desperately trying to get his get kid through Public U, and add a wing on his gross MacMansion, while towing his outboard up to the lake for five hours of water-skiing, without an opera, symphony, or NPR analysis on the radio).

Victor Davis Hanson nails Obama: The Great Divider

VDH always has good wide perspectives.  He calls out President Urkel on a number of subjects in an article over at Pajamas Media.  First the ridiculous fact that Mr Obama feels a need to trash Rush Limbaugh, comparing the President’s crybaby public comments to the class shown by the previous President, who was savaged in ways that Mr Obama will never be.

Did George Bush go after Bill Maher or Air American or Keith Olbermann when almost daily they slandered his character? Did he serially evoke Michael Moore? To have done so by name, would have demeaned his office. Worry about refuting conservative ideas, and governing the country, rather than dueling over the airways with those who get paid for only that. The country wanted a Lincoln, not another Nixon going after Dan Rather at a press conference. So far your administration resembles the latter, not the former.

Then he gets to the President’s blatant class warfare rhetoric:

And there was more still in that address: “A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future. . .Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market.”

But Mr. President, deficits arose from out-of-control spending, inasmuch as the Bush tax cuts resulted in increased revenue. It is fair to fault the past eight years of profligate spending, but when you engage in such demagoguery, the American people can detect your subtext: “I won’t criticize Bush’s spending because I found it not enough and will trump it; I will criticize his tax cuts, since I want to make the wealthier pay for my even greater borrowing.”

Cutting taxes on everyone who pays them is not transferring wealth, unless you believe that one’s own income belongs to the government in the first place. Under Bush, nearly 50% of the tax filers for the first time paid no income tax at all—hardly a transfer of wealth.

As far as “gutting” regulations go, I don’t think you wish to go there—given the careers of Franklin Rains, a disgraced Jim Johnson (of your recent hire), Barney Frank, and Chris Dodd, who not only really did gut regulations that were at the center of the financial meltdown, but profited from such complicit laxity.

He closes with a comment about the radical transformation that Comrade Obama is attempting to foist on Americans:

A final note. You are engaged on a vast revolutionary agenda, one that if successful will create a high-tax, big government, large entitlement, UN-centered, and European-emulating country, far different from America of the past. Given you political skills and the current economic crisis, you, as FDR once did, may well pull it off.

…

But there will come a time, when you will rue the politics of class warfare and the rhetoric of the demagogue—and may find the very intensities that you are unleashing for political advantage now, later on will be precisely those that you most regret that even you cannot control.

So a little less ‘Bush did it’ or Rush this and Sean that, and a little more of the need of all Americans to debate in calm and respect dissension in these times of uncertainty in which no one has all the answers.

When the facts and the realities of economics are not on your side, you have to approach it with the level of dishonesty and rhetoric that Mr Obama and his minions are employing.  Since they cannot win the debate then they want to win the public mudslinging contest.

You people who voted for the least qualified candidate in US history are going to have to answer for your myrmidon-ism.  You have screwed at least a generation of Americans.  Hope and Change, comrades.

A Funny Sort of Depression

Victor Davis Hanson (website) is about the best and most thoughtful historian out there these days, the sort of guy who always has a very wide perspective on current events’ place in history.  Read anything that he has written, for example The Soul of Battle is excellent.

He wrote an article a couple of days ago in which he tries to put some perspective on our current economic crisis.  Hanson notes that while we do have a huge deficit, it is being funded by Japan and China at almost no interest.  Even now, almost 93 percent of the American workforce is still employed.  And the “crash” in energy prices has not only had a huge positive impact on the average American’s wallet, but those same lower oil prices have also had the benefit of hurting some who are hard to feel sorry for: The Persian Gulf states, Russia, and Venezuela.

Hanson sums up some postive results:

For the vast majority of Americans with jobs, the fall in prices for almost everything from food to cars has, in real dollars, meant an actual increase in purchasing power. The loss in value of home equity is serious for those who need to relocate for work or want to downsize and move to an apartment or a retirement community. But when averaged over the last decade, real estate still shows a substantial annual increase in value.

Moreover, the vast majority of American homeowners — well over 90 percent — meet their mortgage payments. They have no plans to flip their homes for profit. For them, the fact that they have lost paper equity, or even owe more than their homes are currently appraised at, is scary — but not equivalent to a depression. Most are confident that after a few years their houses will appreciate again. As for now, working young couples have a chance to buy a house that would have been impossible just two years ago.

Not denying that we are in a tough spot to say the least, Professor Hanson does deliver some perspective on all of this:

Unemployment insurance, welfare, food stamps and even more new social programs on the way have redefined poverty from what our grandparents told us of the Great Depression.

I live in southeastern Fresno County, one of the poorest regions of a now nearly bankrupt California. Many people are hurting. Yet to go to the local Wal-Mart is to see late-model cars in the parking lots and plenty of cell phones, iPods and BlackBerrys among the shoppers. Carts are stuffed with consumer goods, lots of food and Easter confections.

So are we in a depression that justifies a vast redefinition of government and a massive takeover of the private sector? Not quite. What we are a witnessing instead is a sharp downturn from the most affluent era in the history of civilization. For the last two decades, we borrowed and spent as if there were no tomorrow. Now we are living in that tomorrow of cutting back and making do.

In relative terms, it is no longer 2005, but that does not mean it is 1932 either.

VDH always brings an interesting and historically wide perspective on things.

The Impending Obama Meltdown

Before the election, while I was listening to a Victor Davis Hanson interview on a podcast of the Hugh Hewitt show, one thing that the esteemed historian said stuck with me and I have repeated it to a number of people since.  He talked about the danger of electing a President with Barack Obama’s unique combination of far-reaching hubris and genuine naivete.   That worried me then and even contributed to leaving me in a little bit of a state of denial.  I had a hard time believing that my fellow Americans would put such a uniquely unqualified and untested individual in the White House.  I remain a little bit stunned…. but I am rambling again.  This is about VDH’s article today at The Corner on National Review.

Professor Hanson argues that we are beginning to see the results of the media putting The One up on a pedestal during the election rather than doing their jobs:

Some of us have been warning that it was not healthy for the U.S. media to have deified rather than questioned Obama, especially given that they tore apart Bush, ridiculed Palin, and caricatured Hillary. And now we can see the results of their two years of advocacy rather than scrutiny.

We are quite literally after two weeks teetering on an Obama implosion—and with no Dick Morris to bail him out—brought on by messianic delusions of grandeur, hubris, and a strange naivete that soaring rhetoric and a multiracial profile can add requisite cover to good old-fashioned Chicago politicking.

He uses as examples the scandal-ridden cabinet appointments, the horrible so-called stimulus package which he describes as “simply a way to go into debt for a generation to shower Democratic constinuencies with cash”, and other early problems including his slowness to dismantle the Bush anti-terror infrastructure:

Fourth, there was the campaign rhetoric of Bush shredding the Constitution—FISA, Guantanamo, Patriot Act, Iraq, renditions, etc.—followed by “all that for now stays the same” inasmuch as we haven’t ben hit in over seven years and can’t risk another attack.

If Obama knows one thing it is this: if he proceeds with the Daily Kos roadmap for returning to a September 10th mindset, and we are hit again, he is toast.  Now that he gets the daily briefings even he has to admit to himself what a naive tool he was during the election, filled with know-nothing rhetoric that got the Democrat Underground all a-twitter.

I remember Clinton coming into office in 93, the ‘hippies’ coming into town, and how they seemed a little too drunk with power to restrain themselves.  The result of tax increases and gays in the military and other liberal actions was Newt Gingrich and his GOP revolution (which was very good for our country, it forced Clinton to govern as a centrist).  At first I really thought that Obama would be much slicker than Clinton was in his bumbling first months, but I think that even I have overestimated him.  VDH predicts huge results:

At home, Obama is becoming laughable and laying the groundwork for the greatest conservative populist reaction since the Reagan Revolution.

We shall see about that one.  But Hanson labels the Obama start a “disaster”:

This is quite serious. I can’t recall a similarly disastrous start in a half-century (far worse than Bill Clinton’s initial slips). Obama immediately must lower the hope-and-change rhetoric, ignore Reid/Pelosi, drop the therapy, and accept the tragic view that the world abroad is not misunderstood but quite dangerous. And he must listen on foreign policy to his National Security Advisor, Billary, and Sec. of Defense. If he doesn’t quit the messianic style and perpetual campaign mode, and begin humbly governing, then he will devolve into Carterism—angry that the once-fawning press betrayed him while we the people, due to our American malaise, are to blame.

Read the whole article here at The Corner on National Review.

In case VDH is new to any readers I have to give him a well deserved plug.  Victor Davis Hanson is one of the sharpest historians out there and has real depth and an ability to put current events into perspective, often drawing analogies to ancient history.  Read every article that you can find from him, he writes for Pajamas Media and has his own site as well.  I have read almost all of his books and recommend them all.  The Soul Of Battle was particularly good.