Polonius POTUS
The President who speaks (and speaks and speaks).
On the seventh day, God rested. But not Barack. Knowing the great
work of mismanaging health care, bankrupting the economy and
giving aid and succor to the nation’s enemies was not yet done,
the president appeared on no fewer than five television programs
on Sunday, Sept. 20 — lecturing the American people on the need
for immediate action on thousands of pages of health care
legislation that neither he nor anyone else has even read.
This is good for us. We need to know the error of our ways.
Barack will do that for us, and then some! No president has ever
talked so much, or dished out so much free and unsolicited
advice.
Appearing on television before millions of American school
children earlier in the month, he served up one platitude after
another of stunning banality. “This above all,” he said, “to
thine own self be true.” No, wait, it was Shakespeare’s Polonius
who said that. But Barack said something strikingly similar. That
was just one of dozens of recent speaking engagements for this
most front-and-center of presidents.
Like Polonius, who proudly announces in Hamlet
that he “played once i’th’ university…I did enact Julius
Caesar,” Mr. Obama is something of a thespian.
Speaking on the anniversary of the collapse of Lehman
Brothers, he played the part of an angry Moses come down from the
mountaintop — warning bankers what would happen if they failed
to mend their ways in accordance with his commandments. He told
them that he would not intervene a second time to save them from
themselves. No, he would let them fall straight to hell. “I want
them (i.e. the evil bankers) to hear my words,” said he, nodding
his head at the gravity of his own words. “Those on Wall Street
cannot resume taking risks without regard for the consequences
and expect that the next time, American taxpayers will be there
to break their fall.”
Sometimes, Barack cannot hide his impatience with those who doubt
his omnipotence. One time, rolling up his sleeves at the
entrance to the Augean stables, he said, “I don’t want the folks
who created the mess to do a lot of talking. I want them to get
out of the way so we can clean up the mess. I don’t mind cleaning
up after them but don’t do a lot of talking.”
Maya Soetoro-Ng, Barack’s Indonesian-born half
sister, relates
that “There was this joke in our childhood that he was going to
be the first African-American president.” It was based, she says,
“on the fact that he was so bossy and he was always winning
arguments. You know, he was always trying to tell people what to
do so we were like, ‘Oh, yes, Mr. President!’”
Where does this unwavering certainty and wonderful belief in
one’s self come from?
It comes from his vision.
In his classic book The Vision of the Anointed:
Self-Congratulations as a Basis for Social Policy, the
economist and social commentator Thomas Sowell described two
opposing visions: one tragic, the other triumphant. While the
tragic vision is bound by a sense of limitation, the triumphant
vision is characterized by total certainty in the ability of the
advanced or anointed few to alter the course of human events and
make wise and momentous decisions for the good of all.
To someone adhering to the former vision, police, prisons and
other parts of the criminal justice system represent necessary if
unfortunate trade-offs in protecting individual freedom and
property rights. Adam Smith, the most celebrated proponent of
limited government, underscored this view of an intrinsically
flawed and imperfectable humanity in his comment on the problem
of crime in a free society. “Mercy to the guilty,” he said, “is
cruelty to the innocent.”
To others subscribing to the latter vision, however, the
preferred approach is to prevent crime from arising in the first
place by creating a more perfect society. That is to say, they
believe it is within their power to devise a deliberate and
artfully constructed plan that will eliminate the root causes of
crime. The anointed few aspire to “solutions” of their own
creation that offer a clean and miraculous (i.e., essentially
costless) break with the past. And this is where candidate Obama
— unbounded by any kind of a reality check — enjoyed a huge
advantage over President Obama.
Most Americans admit to being confused over the issues involved
in the health care dispute. In fact, the American people have
received a crash course on the economics of health care reform
that has made them more aware than ever that there is indeed “no
free lunch” — meaning that there is no way that the government
can force insurers and employers to extend coverage to millions
of additional people, and be more
generous in the coverage they provide (turning a blind eye
to pre-existing conditions and meeting all kinds of new federal
mandates), while, at the same time, reducing costs, avoiding the
need for rationing, and adding not so much as a dime to the
federal deficit.
Still more, the American people can see that this is not the best
time to add another vast entitlement program to those we already
have with Medicare and Medicaid — given the vast unfunded
liabilities of those two programs.
Ironically, if predictably, the transition from talking about
health care to actually doing something has put the president at
loggerheads with some of his closest allies. The so-called
Obama/Baucus bill would impose a 35% tax on high-dollar, or
“Cadillac,” health plans offered by insurers. Who are the biggest
holders of these gold-plated plans? As it happens, it is not
wealthy individuals, but millions of union workers who have long
benefited from a tax code that unfairly exempts their health care
benefits from income tax in a way that does not apply to the
self-employed and many others who work for small, un-unionized
companies. Insurers would have no choice but to pass the cost of
higher taxes back to their customers — large companies which
would presumably respond by being that much more resistant to
union demands for higher wages. Not surprisingly, union bosses
are screaming for amendments that would peel back Mr. Obama’s
“Cadillac” tax.
Similarly, young people were thrilled by Mr. Obama’s rhetoric
during the last election. They were moved by his vague and often
platitudinous talk about “change” and “hope.” Now he proposes to
force millions of these same young people to buy expensive health
insurance plans — in effect, cross-subsidizing the plans held by
their parents and grandparents — if anything like the current
plan is adopted into law.
The real world — as opposed to the fairy-tale world that
occupies the mind of Shakespeare’s incorrigible advice giver —
is one of hard choices and trade-offs, made in the recognition of
limitations in human knowledge, wisdom and resources. It is not a
world that is easily transformed by mere speechifying.
But there is one piece of advice that the president would be wise
to heed. As Polonius said, he should remember that “Brevity is
the soul of wit.”
