Today's Democrats like to portray themselves as the party of "progress," possessed of "the audacity of hope" — and their Republican opponents as stodgy defenders of the status quo, offering no prospect for improving the lives of ordinary Americans. Yet this rhetoric is routinely belied by presumptive presidential nominee Barack Obama's representations of economic growth as (at best) a zero-sum game. Consider his post-primary remarks in Portland, Oregon: "We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times . . . and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK." Similarly, Michelle Obama has remarked, "The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more."
To the Obamas, both the world in general and America in particular have only a fixed quantity of resources (natural and financial). Their politics of "hope" consists of living with less to provide an expanded "pie" for others, to avoid offending other nations by our wealth and comfort, and to make the supply last as long as possible. Accordingly, Democrats oppose expanding our energy supply by allowing oil exploration in Alaska, off the Florida coast, or in the shale fields of Wyoming, or by developing new nuclear plants. Better to adjust our wants downward rather than persist in believing that we can enjoy an ever-rising standard of living for all.
The stance of leading Democrats like Obama and Al Gore has obvious links to the "limits to growth" movement of the 1970's — and to Jimmy Carter's notorious "malaise" speech, in which he admonished Americans that their irritation at waiting in long lines for gasoline resulted from an underlying deficiency in their character, rather than from the cockeyed rationing scheme he had introduced. But the origins of this political stance lie much farther back, with a politician celebrated — like Obama — for his inspiring rhetoric, and his promise of hope in tough economic times: Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
FDR offered a comprehensive statement of his outlook in the 1932 presidential campaign address he delivered to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco. Early in that speech, Roosevelt defined democracy as "a quest, a never-ending seeking for better things." He then proceeded to dampen such hopes.
In short, he said that the time for economic expansion and international business leadership was over. In his mind, it was time for the government to take over and manage what private industry had accomplished to that point. FDR called on Americans to "exercise 'reciprocal self-denial' for 'the general advantage.'" Hm, that sounds familiar, does it not, Senator Obama? Pop quiz: what else does it sounds like? My answer would be voluntary socialism.
FDR's policy visions brought economic disaster to our nation:
[H]is "limits to growth" outlook proved a self-fulfilling prophecy in the years leading up to World War II. Attempts to fix wages and prices, along with "agricultural" programs that appallingly paid farmers to slaughter their farm animals and destroy crops in an era of widespread hunger, deepened the economic woes engendered by the 1929 stock market crash and the protectionist Smoot-Hawley tariff, leading to the Great Depression.
Meantime, FDR's repeated attacks on businessmen, whether rhetorical (depicting them variously as "economic royalists," "unethical" Ishmaels whose "hand[s]" were "against every man's," ignoble "self-seekers" and "money changers") or legal (such as the feckless prosecution, born of personal grudges, of former Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon) discouraged private investment.
The one redeeming thing FDR possessed -- which Barack most assuredly does not -- was an unwillingness to capitulate in the face of the Nazi war machine in WWII:
Unlike Obama, FDR never sought unconditional personal meetings with leaders of nations that threatened us, or thought that their determined hostility would somehow be appeased thereby. Nor did he imply that foreign resentments of America's vast power were at all justified by our supposedly excessive standard of living.
Can we say Iran negotiations without pre-conditions? Barack Obama embodies all the negatives of FDR while lacking the primary redeeming quality FDR had. But that's typical. Outside of JFK, who actually "instituted a tax cut to promote business investment and encouraged America's readiness to 'pay any price, bear any burden' for the defense of freedom" -- wow, that doesn't sound like today's Dems, does it? -- every Democrat President since FDR has maintained the same zero-sum, diminishing expectations policies. The infection of liberalism is alive and well in today's versions of those policies:
Like the late theoretician John Rawls, many liberals seem inspired by John Stuart Mill's vision of a "steady state" economy — in which people's standard of living remains constant rather than improving, so that we can devote ourselves to nobler things than wealth (while simultaneously redistributing the wealth we have to enhance the prospects of the "less advantaged," as if the Great Society's failures were unrecognized). Hence the appeal of the specter of "global warming": as with the mid-1970s' bugaboo of "global cooling," the motive is to cut back on ordinary people's standard of living, or at least restrict its rise, in the name of an imagined vision of non-materialistic global brotherhood.
His advice to John McCain:
The best prospect for John McCain and the Republicans in this year's elections is to stress the contrast between their genuine program of reasonable hope — victory in Iraq, adopting health-care policies that enable consumer choice, and renewing the Bush tax cuts to fuel entrepreneurship and job creation — and the Democrats' policy of pessimism, resignation, and perpetual fighting over a permanently fixed economic pie.
This is one of the great disconnects with Barack Obama. He spews a lot of platitudes about hope and change, but if you look at his policies and record, he is the epitome of a 60-year old track record of pessimistic failure. Just because he's a great orator doesn't mean his policies are worth the air he breathes to voice them. In fact, history shows us that they are less than worthless; they are actually harmful. I hope McCain begins to call him on some of these policies, because there is no shortage of winning issues to hammer on with Obama's radical 'progressive' strain of retro-liberalism.
There's my two cents.
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