On Tuesday last week, President Obama went to a small town in Kansas to lay out his basic campaign theme for the coming election: a commitment to “fairness.”
In Obama’s America, we all are dependent on the government, closely regulated, heavily taxed … and poor. He boldly proclaims that rugged individualism doesn’t work and neither do tax cuts.
Instead, government management of the economy, heavy subsidies and universal welfare is the key to economic health.
But in Obama’s obsessive focus on income redistribution, he ignores the basic question of wealth and job creation. Where will the money he wants to tax come from? Who will generate the well-paid jobs he wants to pass around? What entrepreneur will take a risk or invent a product or service or pioneer a new business when he cannot be sure of keeping what he earns?
To Obama, fairness is defined as meaning we all move up or down together and nobody gets more than his fair share.
Fair? Determined by whom? By the government! By politicians seeking votes. In his world, it is through political action, not economic initiative, that people assure their upward mobility.
But as Margaret Thatcher said, “Sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.” And then, there is no wealth to redistribute, no money to allocate “fairly.”
In Obama’s America, there are no incentives for creating jobs. So there will be no jobs. There is no reason to take risks. So nobody will take risks. There is no capacity for individual initiative. So there won’t be any.
Never has Obama laid out as completely his disastrous vision for America. He has now articulated his socialist vision for our country. It won’t work. It is a recipe for national decay and dependency.
Nor will it work politically. In a recent Rasmussen Poll, voters agreed by 3-1 that they had more to fear from overreaching politicians than from greedy businessmen.
A politics based on envy and class division just won’t fly in the United States. Obama’s got the wrong country.
[Dick Morris, former political consultant and pollster, writes a nationally syndicated political column and provides commentary for Fox News.] COPYRIGHT 2011 DICK MORRIS AND EILEEN MCGANN; DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
