Excerpt:
Obama, the supposedly savvy politician, oddly has little appreciation of the psychology of business.
[…]Obama’s policies are also seen as malleable and predicated on notions of social justice rather than on absolute adherence to the law — as in the reordering of the Chrysler creditors and the recent threats against health insurers who do not toe the federal line. Employers are human. Call them greedy, undeserving of their profits, and prone to party at Vegas — and in hurt they will sit on their money and wait such castigation out.
There also seems to be little appreciation of how one creates wealth — not surprising, since Obama and his economic architects are mostly salaried elitists who have spent much of their lives on various tenured government payrolls. Almost none were entrepreneurs who had built businesses from nothing.
The result is that Obama has little insight into the mentality of a businessperson, whose values and world view are antithetical to those of the salaried and tenured employee who accepts stability and a monthly check as he does the changing of the seasons. But to the self-employed, the world is an often hostile place in which a bad back, a chance fire, an unethical employee, a wrong guess, or a national recession can destroy years of hard work in a blink.
Nor do the Obamians appreciate that the possibilities for wealth creation are infinite: The more rewards the audacious see, the more they take risks to turn ideas into new products and services. That energy enriches us all. Instead, there is now the return of the old peasant mentality of a limited good. With a finite pie, one slice to someone must mean one less to someone else. The relative wealth of a few, not absolute wealth for all, is what matters.
Implicit here is Obama’s progressive notion that wealth is unfairly allotted, ill gotten, and ill spent, and therefore should not be entirely one’s own. Surgeons in countries without socialized medicine, he has told us, make money by gratuitously slicing off limbs or ripping out tonsils. High earners can go to Vegas or the Super Bowl without thinking twice about it, given the superfluity of their riches. “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money,” the president pontificates — a variation on his earlier lament that the Supreme Court had never demanded “redistributive change.” Where that “certain point” rests, we do not know, though we suspect it is high enough to allow vacationing at the Costa del Sol and Martha’s Vineyard.
In his mind, government simply cannot allow one person to make $10 an hour digging a ditch, and another $300 an hour sitting behind a desk closing a deal. The old tragic justifications of the inequality in compensation inherent in capitalism — one rises up the job chain, and recompense is not rigid and fixed; the successful entrepreneur takes more risk, may have greater skills and education, can create more wealth for others, is luckier, more motivated, or healthier, accepts more stress, does not necessarily want the more moral or enjoyable life — mean little to the therapeutic Obama. His Manichean world is fixed: suspect rich and noble poor.
As a materialist he judges equity in life by income. Thus he sees the government’s proper moral obligation not as ensuring equality out of the starting gate, but as guaranteeing that we all reach the finish line at the same exact moment.
This article is the top article on National Review right now. It’s worth a look.
This post on the economic policies of Margaret Thatcher may also be helpful. Maggie cut taxes and busted up unions. And everybody – rich and poor – saw their standard of living go way, way up! A JOB IS THE ULTIMATE STIMULUS PROGRAM.
WINTERY KNIGHT 