Barack Obama has set his sights on something bigger than winning
a second term as president of the declining and much-maligned (not
least by himself) superpower known as the United States of America.
He now aims to end “the injustice, the outrage,” and, not to mince
words, the pestilential global scourge of — hold your
breath — “modern slavery.”
The president announced this monumental new undertaking in a
speech yesterday to the Clinton Global Initiative. The CGI is an
“invitation only” annual gabfest that extracts $20,000 from each of
thousands of big-thinking and apparently sleep-challenged invitees
who regard the old gasbag Bill Clinton as some kind of an
intellectual colossus. This is how Andrew Ferguson of the
Weekly Standard described the organization in an article
on Feb. 27 of this year:
CGI is the kind of charity that students of Clinton’s career
would expect him to lead: It hires a legion of over-schooled
high-achievers and collects mountains of money and, instead of
giving the money to poor people, hospitals, doctors, nurses, food
banks, or stuff like that, spends it on an annual conference in
which high-achievers talk for long periods of time about what it
would be like if they were going to do stuff like that. It is an
organization devoted to talk.
A perfect fit, you might say. This is the organization and the
audience that our 44th president addressed in picking up
long-disused cudgels of 19th century liberals who championed the
(real) anti-slavery cause. Let us leave aside the fact that the
19th century liberals were diametrically opposed in almost every
important way from the 21st century mountebanks who call themselves
liberals or progressives.
Fortunately, there was at least a single skeptic in yesterday’s
audience in New York.
In this great audience of notables — including many heads of
state or former heads of states, CEO’s of major corporations,
assorted billionaires like Warren Buffett, leaders of major
foundations, and other riff-raff — someone dared to tut-tut at the
phrase “modern slavery.” Upon hearing this, the president
immediately added (and I am giving him the benefit of the doubt in
assuming this wasn’t part of the script that he read from the
teleprompter):
Now, I do not use that word, “slavery,” lightly. It evokes
obviously one the most painful chapters in our nation’s
history.
But it must be said that the president’s use of the word
“slavery” — like his use of other words and phrases such as
“millionaires and billionaires,” “affordable” (as in health care),
“investment” (as in Solyndra), or “transparency” (as in bills that
run to 2,700 pages in length that nobody bothers to read before
they are passed) — is highly flexible and more than a little
slippery. This is how he described “slavery” in his CGI speech:
But around the world there’s no denying the awful reality. When
a man, desperate for work, toiling, for little or no pay, beaten if
he tries to escape — that is slavery. When a woman is locked in a
sweatshop, or trapped in a home as a domestic servant, alone and
abused and incapable of leaving — that’s slavery.
Far better — if you get the drift of modern welfare state
progressivism — if people do not work under a
slave-driving organization such as Walmart or the small business
owned by some relative and operate instead under an entirely
different yoke — that of learned helplessness — which
enables them to think that they really can live from the crumbs of
the rich man’s table.
Now there is the real “trickle-down economics.” It is none other
than government-decided redistribution — which has the perverse
effects of simultaneously encouraging joblessness, helplessness,
and hopelessness (not to mention the widespread obesity among the
benefit-rich but nonworking poor) who might otherwise follow the
example of hard work and individual initiative that has led so many
others to greater freedom, prosperity, and happiness — coming from
earned success.
According to Obama, there are “more than 20 million victims” of
inhuman “human trafficking” around the world. Now I have no idea
(any more than Barack Obama himself does) whether that figure is
high, low, or right on the money.
But if I had been captured by the White House Communication
staff and forced into involuntary slavery as one of Obama’s
speechwriters, I would have told the president he should have
multiplied the number of supposed victims by a factor of ten.
Why?
Well, first of all, who could possibly prove you wrong — and
this in an administration that has never been overly-worried about
distorting the truth. But more importantly, you’ve got to come up
with something better than 0.3% of the world’s population of more
than 7 billion people — which is what you get with just 20 million
or so victims.
In his speech, Obama showed how out of touch he is with the
American experience — and indeed the global experience — in not
recognizing the real well-springs of prosperity in giving people
the freedom and the opportunity to pursue happiness (and individual
exchange for mutual benefit) in their own ways.
Now that was the speech that Mitt Romney gave to the same group
yesterday.
His was incomparably the better (as well as the shorter)
speech.
