by James May • April 15, 2011
On April, 13, 2011 President Barack Obama gave what is known as his "Debt Speech" at George Washington University. That speech encapsulated the centerpiece of liberal thought on the political Left for the last half century as well as the attendant reasons for the zeitgeist inspired and government enabled downward spiral of America.
Obama's recent speech was textbook liberal thinking; it sets up false arguments that if an individual who is completely disconnected from another individual has a good life and another an unfortunate one, that when it comes to taxes that the fortunate person is to "blame" and is 'stealing' from the less fortunate. Call it what you want in specific parlance, it's not Republican Democracy but court ordered Socialism.
At the heart of it is the liberal Left's entire reason for living, the basis of all their thought: that the people most responsible for their own welfare are in fact the least deserving of their fate, good or ill, and so must be denuded or recompensed accordingly.
It sets up America as one giant Sherwood Forest where morality is doled out according to one's financial success. Obama is Robin Hood and he knows that success on the part of one person means that someone else must in turn have been diminished. In reality Errol Flynn has become a demanding bastard entirely separated from the happy fairy tale imperatives normally associated with the story and his band of Merry Men an anti-colonialist group of con men who dole out guilt and steal morality in order to enable their view that success is the result of privilege and tacit theft.
All you have to do to join King John and his evil cronies is work hard, be lucky and disciplined and be a success. To be a band of merry men, you must fail, be slothful, unlucky or whatever other slings and arrows come your way which you throw at your betters because that is their use, to even out bad and good people and spread the wealth, and garbage, around. What is the message to our young? That to achieve is to only achieve immorality that MUST be funneled away from you, washed away in a frenzy of forced sharing that will also wash away your sins, which are the sins of the West and European Americans? Why is anyone surprised the "great unwashed" have a sense of entitlement? They are being told they are spiritually deserving and better people who have been robbed by the privileged and undeserving.
The giant elephant in the room is the false idea of a connection everyone has to each other as individuals who must trade off their success and failure because the government says so. We are in effect an ant colony wherein individual achievement counts for only how much it can be invested back into the colony. In the end, there is no individual achievement, not really; there is only privilege or the lack of it, the exploited and the exploiters.
The two schools of thought are diametrically opposed because the pragmatic aren't asking anyone to do anything really, they just want to be left to their own devices. The liberal Left has other ideas and want you to subscribe to to an entire range of notions whether you like it or not and pay for them as well. The Left demonizes people as an explanation and motivator as did Obama in that George Washington University Speech.
Obama early on in the speech gives us this:
From our first days as a nation, we have put our faith in free markets and free enterprise as the engine of America’s wealth and prosperity. More than citizens of any other country, we are rugged individualists, a self-reliant people with a healthy skepticism of too much government." He forgot to emphasize the past tense for his next little ditty.
Then came the big "BUT" "...and a belief that we are all connected; and that there are some things we can only do together, as a nation."
That first nod to individualism is just fluff and that second "but" his real argument and the false one. We are not all connected in the way Obama suggests, not at all but "none of your business" is not something in his lexicon.
According to Obama, this "connection" results in a "conviction that each one of us deserves some basic measure of security."
Really? "Deserve"? That's a pretty heady word here - shouldn't he really be saying something like deserving to have our individual differences protected by letting individuals alone and let the Devil and reality take the hindmost - without dark there is no light. And "conviction"? On the part of who and who decides this? Obama would have you believe in the "greater good" but it is the greater good of the ant colony and so not a true and Jeffersonian version of sharing which is to mean opportunity and not a forced sharing which means the fruits of that opportunity. In this sense, Obama's use of the word "fairness" is monstrous. A fighting chance is all we "deserve" because it's what reality gives us. You take your licks otherwise as you or fate decides. That's not to say we shouldn't organize ourselves and rail against the worst aspects of reality - we have done so as part of our history as Americans. But that's not the same thing as simply ignoring reality and giving out thrones and crowning everyone king. If everyone is king then no one is king and that sounds fine on the surface but our country was founded on the notion that there was in fact a regal aspect to the human spirit and that was to break the bonds of class and let that spirit soar, an individual spirit, set free by what it CAN do and not fettered by what others can't.
"Am I my brothers keeper" is a rhetorical and philosophical question, not the bewildered acknowledgment of an order from the President of the United States and a ticket to welfare status or equality.
Obama says: "We take responsibility for ourselves and each other;" Again, really? Even into my living room and deep into my wallet and does that "we" mean all of the Third World as well? - apparently it does - more useful drones to vote Democrat. With the 1965 Immigration and Nationalization Act America unintentionally led to enshrining its guilt over its sins against native Americans and the Third World by setting out to have ourselves and our way of life replaced by a baby boom from the Third World; the fact that our system of government and our Constitution is being torn to shreds seems not to concern the liberal Left one little bit. It certainly doesn't concern Obama and in fact seems to compliment his mind set to wash colonialism's mouth out with soap and preside over the marginalization of the very European culture without which there is no America.
They say the Devil is in the details but in this case of our national debt it's not; of what use are plans, no matter how carefully laid out that are based on nonsense and that ignore the true nature of people and success, as well as our own Constitution that had a keen awareness of human frailty and addressed that frailty to protect all and not to enable frailty to dominate opportunity. The Constitution is meant to let us go our own way, not to act as a lasso either to restrain us or rein in hordes of illegal immigrants to overwhelm American society.
Obama has the nerve to further demonize his opponents by saying that this "sense of responsibility" is "patriotism"; let me parse that out to what it comes down to on real issues which is to say 'racist' and 'bigoted', a profiler and an insensitive one at that. This issue isn't just about taxes but freedom, it's about "Don't tread on me". If Obama had been in charge of the Oklahoma land rush it would have been women and children, gays and blacks and Latinos and the elderly first. America is not a sinking ship and there is no reason to treat it as such because one must be careful of what one wishes for.
According to Obama, individualists and those who acknowledge the role of personal responsibility in life are in fact people who want to throw old people and children to the wolves.
In speaking of the evil Republicans, Obama says:
They want to give people like me a two hundred thousand dollar tax cut that’s paid for by asking thirty three seniors to each pay six thousand dollars more in health costs? That’s not right, and it’s not going to happen as long as I’m President.
Well, he got the "That's not right" part correct but has lost what impelled America to lead the world in art and technology. The fact is that those stipulated 33 seniors have absolutely nothing to do with people who make over 200 grand; there is no connection but only glibness and disingenuousness. What it is is a grand lie, meant to further his own vision of anti-colonialism and take down his opponents to the level of scheming, privileged, immoral and selfish and it's all straw man, every bit of it.
Ants succeed because they work together - I am not an ant. I am not the Sheriff of Nottingham. I am a free thinking individual who wants to be left alone and the government out of my life as much as is practicable. Practicable does not mean swarming over every bit of high ground to level it all out for more easy passage for the many. Americans are charitable people and to whatever extent that is true it is to that extent it will have to suffice because I am not on this Earth to take marching orders from a Queen; the divine right of Kings - and Queens - remember that?
People forget the real and original meaning of that famous statement in the Declaration of Independence that said:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
That was a shot squarely across the bow of the English king from a ship of Englishman and the idea that a king's right to rule was ordained by God. Notice the use of the word "consent". "Created equal" meant in opportunity, not in measure; it is the very heart of the phrase, "pursuit of happiness". It is that pursuit that is meant to be protected, not the outcome of that pursuit. That is up to the individual and the Constitution of the United States gives us a hearty "good luck" as it shoves us out the door to the real world.
That real world was not meant to include welfare or gerrymandering illegal foreign nationals to help destroy the very Constitution itself, as if it was to be viewed as some kind of suicide pact, faithful to the very end. Welfare destroys initiative and marginalizes the hard work of others and I am not going to allow the government to march me out of my own life to put away enough food for the winter for everyone, even the crickets. All work and no play takes the luster off the Constitution - it not only makes me an ant but one that is at the service of the crickets - a part time slave to my own government and my fellow Americans; that's not charity, it's enforced labor and America in that little way a labor camp.
When did I sign up for this? It's certainly not in the Constitution. I was born into a compact that acknowledges that in fact my rights are not ordained by God or given to me by my fellow men but are enshrined by my fellow men in the realization of the very nature of reality itself and the nature of man and "enshrine" is a very different idea than "compel". If Democracy is looked at as simply another dogma that defines us then it isn't really a democracy because democracy doesn't define us it acknowledges us; that is something a man like Barack Ob ama will never understand and his speech screams it. Yes faith is needed to make democracy work but when it veers into the historical junk heap of the dictatorship of the proletariat and other attempts to socially bulldoze the human spirit then all the faith and spirit of giving in the world won't save it from reality one ignores at one's peril. An American is a person who is to be given a full head of steam and not constrained by the least among us and certainly not made to do so by the power of law. Democracy was never meant or envisioned to be a giant charity ward where we build a statue of "The Unsuccessful Citizen", put it right next to the tomb of the Unknown Soldier and build myths and tales around it involving blame, lost opportunity and excuses.
The Democratic Party has become nothing more than a group of altruistic fascists who simultaneously invoke the human spirit and deny it in one fell swoop. The truth of the matter is that the disenfranchised have become a political industry gone global in a manner that reminds one of Dickens' Madame Defarge and "The Terror"'. The Golden Age of American exceptionalism has become the Bastille and storming it and reducing it to irrelevance is the goal of people who find tearing down other people to their own level much easier than striving for brilliance or acknowledging reality's own dictum that you cannot measure all people by the best among us. You cannot distribute human genius any more than you can pipe water from the Great Lakes to Arabia and throwing water on the flame of that genius so that the least among us can burn brighter is not an equation that will work because it denies the nature of human beings which is the opposite of what our forefathers did when they created the means by which to enable a nation. If liberalism has become nothing more than a faith divorced from reality of human nature then it will have to render unto Caesar whether it likes it or not because the stars in their revolutions in the sky demand as much.
The best among us have proven to be a beacon to guide and uplift others and this has shown to be true again and again. The great truth about America is that success doesn't come from privilege but despite a lack of privilege because the strength of our history has been to acknowledge strength where we find it regardless of its origins and to admire the Horatio Alger rags to riches story enabled by our lack of respect for aristocracy and our admiration for merit. Now that America is led by a President who not only denies merit but posits the existence of a de facto aristocracy that must be taken down a peg in order to make room for those who deny the idea that you can't keep a good man down it is no surprise that America is exhibiting the problems that mandating rather than observing rags to riches entails. To see merit where there is none and to deny its presence where it is goes against the grain of American thought and experience and results in nothing more than mad attempts to engineer Horatio Alger in a Frankenstein experiment gone terribly wrong, seeking to plant the flame of life precisely in the places it can find no purchase and where one cannot predict. The America experience is that good things are where you find than and not where you expect to find them. Americans redefined success for the rest of the world by simply using their eyes and good common sense and not by being tethered to trite and overly polite notions that genius is innate even where there is no sign of it.
In terms of material opportunity Americans have more chances to succeed than ever before but in terms of new philosophical paradigms that bruit about childish stereotypes of how success is achieved there is simply more agitation about why it doesn't work for everyone. The more some people don't succeed in certain groups the more resources are diverted from successful strategies and treasure thrown at the problem as if King Midas could touch a man and produce drive and determination.
The disingenuousness of Obama's speech is that he presents his ideas by first invoking that which in American history has worked and then falsely connects it as the basis of a philosophy for that which will not work. President Obama paraphrases and makes loose with Lincoln's "words", "...that through government, we should do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves.", corralling and shaping Lincoln as if Lincoln was a micro managing socialist in his heart. What is lost in this is where government should be brought up short. What Obama seems to fail to understand is that government itself is hideously expensive because it is a complex bureaucracy that not only duplicates effort but needs to be supported by complex rules written, defended and prosecuted by legions of lawyers and all the supporting bureaucrats that go with it - government is not efficient, it can't be. It's entities are out there in the public eye and realm and need layer on layer of rules to protect it from a litigious America that has emerged in the last 40 years. The threat, weight and expense of lawsuits is one of the single greatest threats and expenses to the public; the American taxpayer funds bureaucracies it cannot defend itself against in a vicious circle of spiraling cost to everyone involved. America simply cannot afford a lot of government because besides the micro managed layering's of bureaucracy the government goes first class in everything it does and modest approaches to government construction projects is not something to be found in our society and that is not even including corruption. Nor am I addressing the mind boggling and Byzantine smoke and mirrors by which even small municipalities finance such things as state of the art sewage and waste disposal, skimmed by corruption and made expensive by unnecessary government over regulation.
It's a long way from going from Lincoln to "We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, hard times or bad luck, a crippling illness or a layoff, may strike any one of us." Suddenly 'what we cannot do for ourselves goes from visions of great projects to putting a microscope on people's lives, revealing the recent American penchant for thinking more about what can go wrong than what can go right, as if reality can be bribed into rolling back the shadow it casts over life and death and the American public footing the bill for the greatest engineering project in the history of the world, manipulating luck, life and death as a government concern as if it were a crime to be legislated against. Again, Obama invokes the word "fairness"' without mentioning that almost half the people in America don't even pay taxes.
In his speech, Obama compares America to growth bubbles like South Korea, China and Brazil who will surely collapse as those nations do not thrive on productivity but by ignoring the environment and tapping into baby booms which cannot be sustained; I am not envious of those as role models. What I find most distasteful is that Obama seems to believe that our heightened sense of responsibility to each other engendered by government mismanagement is somehow the fault of the average American. What is lost in all this is a record number of people living in America, over 300 million now and a sure disaster in the future if not right now as many of our problems may be related to the fact that 300 million people simply cannot be governed effectively. Throw in millions of illegal aliens also not mentioned in the speech which suck dry local, state and government funds by way of crime and entitlements and you have a rolling train wreck totally out of control both fiscally and philosophically.