How To Offend A Founder

Those familiar with economic history find it difficult to swallow Obama’s agenda. They understand the implications. So would the Founders. So does Obama; he simply hopes the public are slow to catch on.

Background: Obama may appear to the casual observer to be historically challenged, proclaiming for example that during WWII his great-uncle helped liberate Auschwitz, and his grandfather knew troops that liberated Auschwitz and Treblinka. (This is nonsense. The Americans did not free either camp.) Or, in Berlin, stating when referring to his preferred half color that, "I don’t look like...Americans who’ve previously spoken in this.. city," forgetting apparently that both Powell and Rice had preceded him. Fortunately the fate of our country does not hang on these amusing constructions; it does hang on the success or failure of Obama’s assault on the private sector. That’s a tad more serious and that is where most of the left simply follow, lemming like, as Obama and his co-conspirators conveniently ignore economic history in their pretended role as society’s saviors.

Obama hijacked the economic crisis through the so-called stimulus bill. Now he has manufactured a crisis for the purpose of another government grab; this heist will be permanent, a ready-made legacy. What for example if our friends from the left sat down with James Madison in an attempt to justify their president’s health or economic agenda. Judging from everything Madison has ever written, he would no doubt lose his lunch. Madison warned in 1794 against, "the old trick of turning every contingency into a resource for accumulating force in government." Yet Obama’s crew didn’t even bother to disguise that motivation - "never waste a crisis."

Sure enough, left-leaning administrations here and abroad have over the years levered all kinds of crises. The US Depression is one of the latest such opportunities, the left taking advantage of economic trouble to amass power. And we all understand the "ratchet effect." As problems subside, the enlarged government presence remains.

For those in the "feel good" camp who have never seen an easy way out they didn’t take, perhaps a read of F.A. Hayek’s The Road To Serfdom (Is Paved With Good Intentions) is in order, a book Milton Friedman endorsed as, "..for anyone interested in politics in the broadest and least partisan sense, a book whose central message is timeless." Hayek demonstrates that the left’s trademark of empowering government with increasing economic control will inevitably lead not to a utopia at all but to fascism.

Finally, another Founder reminds us that, "Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants." Alexander Hamilton would find Obama a threat to the Republic to which he and others gave birth.

PS Recall that on Monday, 8/3, the White House website asked citizens to send any "fishy" information regarding the health care plan to flag@whitehouse.gov. "Fishy" as in dissenting. That is, turn in your neighbor. Step one. Hamilton was right.

Robert Craven