It doesn’t matter if companies are making money for their
shareholders or losing money for them. In either case, Barack Obama
sees a “crisis.” Profitable oil companies seem to horrify him as
much, or perhaps even more, than unprofitable investment banks.
One moment he is calling for the government to confiscate
profits; the next moment he is demanding that it generate them. The
glibness of it all — the feeling one gets that his popping off is
based on nothing more than a morning briefing from David Axelrod —
is pretty reckless.
No matter: needing to regain his pep and divert attention from
cultural issues, Obama sees good news for himself in bad economic
headlines. But what does he really know about the economy? He has
opinions about it, but that’s about it, and they seem to all come
from a grab-bag of quasi-Marxist theories he picked up either in
left-wing classrooms or socialist churches.
His warming to the theme of redistributionism — he thinks the
government should just swoop down and take the profits of oil
companies and give them to “the people” — is explained by decades
of tutoring in “liberation theology” at the knee of Jeremiah
Wright.
Only immediate political considerations seem to blunt his
instinctual calls for redistributionism. He is frustrated that
Democrats always lose on the Walter Mondale,
vote-for-me-I-will-raise-your-taxes platform. So he has to go
through the rigmarole of feigning moderation as he clears his
throat during lengthy answers.
“Everyone” will get a tax break, one of his staffers promised on
Hardball this week, even though a moment earlier she had
said that tax rates would be “restored” — the Obama campaign’s
euphemism for bald tax-hiking — for the top two-percent of
earners. Apparently these Americans don’t count as citizens to be
included in the “everyone” category, even though they shoulder over
a third of the federal government’s revenues. It is now well
established that his “tax cuts” are disguised government
subsidies.
Obama has often said that he favors “tax laws that restore some
balance to the distribution of the nation’s wealth,” suggesting
that he is oblivious or indifferent to the steep tax rates of
recent decades. His statist assumptions are automatic and he
doesn’t feel any need to justify them philosophically, immediately
identifying the “nation’s wealth” with the state and the point of
“distribution” with government.
Taxation, under this thinking, exists not for the sake of
financing the government’s legitimate functions but for the sake of
achieving “justice.” This is the straightforward Marxist liberation
theology piped into his Chicago church that has done such wonders
for the Third World.
Liberation theology, which is supposedly designed to stamp out
greed, only succeeds in finding new outlets for it. Not that
Obama’s high-minded social gospel isn’t catching on: according to
CNN, his campaign is “rolling out a new line of ‘faith merchandise’
— the latest move in an ambitious effort to win over religious
voters.” So apparently not all merchants will be driven from his
temple.
In his opportunistic finger-pointing criticisms this week, Obama
spoke darkly about avarice on Wall Street, as if it is a
conservative enclave. The truth is that Wall Street’s fat cats have
been voting for Democrats like Obama for decades. They like the
Dems’ corporate statism, knowing that any crisis created by it will
result in demagogic calls for its expansion. A government-corporate
alliance has gone bust? Well, we will have to create a new one,
with even more regulations, etc., etc.
The claptrap is fatiguing, and every Obama speech is freighted
with it. “Reform” means redistributionism. “Investments” mean
increased government spending.
Shaky companies barely able to keep workers employed can look
forward to helping his administration with its “investments” in
failed public education, phony job retraining programs, and
global-warming dilettantism.
Meanwhile, individual investors can look forward to making
America more just by embracing his ratcheted-up capital gains tax
rate — an idea for restoring confidence to markets only a
community organizer with considerable hubris could propose.
