The president of the United States came to Osawatomie, Kan., last week to deliver a speech of such fascinating awfulness archeologists of the future sifting through the rubble of our civilization will surely doubt whether it could really have been delivered by the chief executive of the global superpower in the year 2011.
“This isn’t about class warfare,” declared President Obama. Really? As his fellow Democrat Dale Bumpers testified at the Clinton impeachment trial, “When you hear somebody say, ‘This is not about sex,’ it’s about sex.” The president understands that “Wall Street,” “banks,” “fat cats,” etc. remain the most inviting target and he figures that he can ride the twin steeds of Resentment and Envy to reelection and four more years of even bigger Big Government. His opponents, he told us, “want to return to the same practices that got us into this mess . . . . And their philosophy is simple: We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules . . . . It doesn’t work. It has never worked.” He blamed our present fix on “this brand of ‘you’re on your own’ economics.”
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This is a deliciously perverse analysis of the situation confronting America and a fin de civilisation West. In what area of life are Americans now “on their own”? By 2008, Fannie and Freddie had a piece of over half the mortgages in this country; the “subprime” mortgage was an invention of government. America’s collective trillion dollars of college debt has been ramped up by government distortion of the student-loan market. Likewise, health care, where Americans labor under the misapprehension that they have a “private” system rather than one whose inflationary pressures and byzantine bureaucracy are both driven largely by remorseless incremental government annexation. Americans are ever less “on their own” in housing, education, health, and most other areas of life — and the present moribund slough is the direct consequence.
It would be truer to say that the present situation reflects the total failure of “you’re not on your own” economics — the delusion of statists that government can insulate millions of people from the vicissitudes of life. Europeans have assured their citizens of cradle-to-grave welfare since the end of the Second World War. This may or may not be an admirable notion, but, both economically and demographically, the bill has come due. Greece is being bailed out by Germany in order to save the eurozone but to do so requires the help of the IMF, which is principally funded by the United States. The entire Western world resembles the English parlor game “Pass the Parcel,” in which a gift wrapped in multiple layers of gaudy paper is passed around until the music stops and a lucky child removes the final wrapping from the shrunken gift to discover his small gift. Except that, in this case, underneath all the bulky layers, there is no there there: Broke nations are being bailed out by a broke transnational organization bankrolled by a broke superpower in order to save a broke currency. Good luck with that.
The political class looted the future to bribe the present, confident that tomorrow could be endlessly postponed. Hey, why not? “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day,” says Macbeth. “To borrow, and to borrow, and to borrow,” said the political class, like Macbeth with a heavy cold (to reprise a rare joke from Mrs. Thatcher). And they failed to anticipate that the petty pace would accelerate and overwhelm them. On Thursday, Jon Corzine, former United States senator, former governor of New Jersey, former Goldman Sachs golden boy, and the man who embodies the malign nexus between Big Government and a financial-services sector tap-dancing on derivatives of derivatives, came to Congress to try to explain how the now-bankrupt entity he ran, MF Global, had managed to misplace $1.2 billion. The man once tipped to be Obama’s Treasury secretary and whom Vice President Biden described as the fellow who’s always “the smartest guy in the room” explained his affairs thus: “I simply do not know where the money is.” Does that apply only to his private business or to his years in the Senate, too?
Spot on, as usual. I would just like to point out that the joke "to borrow, and to borrow, and to borrow" is not originally from Mrs. Thatcher, but was itself borrowed from Mr. Nabokov in Lolita ("as the bard said, with that cold in his head . . .").
As the statists shamelessly pile on the garbage, Mark Steyn undauntedly clears a path through it so that we can at least have a good view of what it going on. Without his heavy lifting in buoyant style, I'd have been hopelessly submerged in it long ago... Thanks, Mark.
The Won is not channeling TR it is the Weather Underground at Osawatomie. As for the Eu, ECB is already printing and the meeting on the ninth was to be a retrofit (though Cameron gave his Churchillian bird) without a full frontal treaty assault. Big bond blow-out in January for France and Nessun Dorma for Italy in February and beyond-- despite tears and fears on telly. Fiat and fiscal union are joined at the hip and remember the fab Fed is rotating dramatis personae so QE z may be just in time for chocolate bennies and the white house oik rolling hunt.
As for MF Global, Hansel who got lost with Gretel with a trail of bread crumbs in the forest last heard the call of the wild-- re-re-hy-hy-pothecation. London rules.
"GOP 2012 presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has hired people close to Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., to head his campaign in Florida."
"Organizing the event: Rubio fundraiser Esther Nuhfer, whom we just learned is going to be Gingrich’s finance director."
"Nuhfer is a political consultant who also has ties to Rep. David Rivera, R-Miami, whom the Federal Election Commission asked to explain personal and campaign finance accounts in August. The St. Petersbrug Times reported in February that “criminal investigators in Miami and Tallahassee comb[ed] through [Rivera's] personal finances and campaign accounts — including the Senate account that fattened Nuhfer’s paycheck. Investigators are focusing on Rivera’s tight relationship with Nuhfer.”
"Rubio's longtime friend, Miami Republican Rep. David Rivera, who appears to be close to getting a clean bill of legal health after weathering a state and federal investigation into his finances, has yet to enter the political fray and said he was neutral for now."
As evidenced by the content of Obama's speech in Kansas, government (municipal, state and federal) is not involved sufficiently in our lives. Only a blinkered idealogue could ever reach such a conclusion. Only the cozy, insulated, provincial, incestuous, liberal coteries in which Obama was formed could produce and sustain such a inversion of reality. We are awash in government regulation and statism is the fountainhead from which most of our current economic miseries flow. There are times when I indulge my paranoia and suspect that Obama is a cog within a great cabalistic machine determined to destroy the United States...and then there are other times when I think he is merely an idiot with a very high sense of self-esteem.
As evidenced by the content of Obama's speech in Kansas, government (municipal, state and federal) is not involved sufficiently in our lives. Only a blinkered idealogue could ever reach such a conclusion. Only the cozy, insulated, provincial, incestuous, liberal coteries in which Obama was formed could produce and sustain such a inversion of reality. We are awash in government regulation and statism is the fountainhead from which most of our current economic miseries flow. There are times when I indulge my paranoia and suspect that Obama is a cog within a great cabalistic machine determined to destroy the United States...and then there are other times when I think he is merely an idiot with a very high sense of self-esteem.
1) dependence: you must rely in others to survive
2) independence: you can survive on your own
3) interdependence: you can survive on your on, but freely choose to rely on others for mutual gain.
We're "all in this together" in levels 1 & 3, but one is oppression and the other is liberty. Obama's shallow thinking cannot comprehend level 3.
Our illegitimate president's downer attitude is what is holding the country back. Malaise Redux, and Carter II. Why are liberal progressive socialists such sad-sacks?
This is yet more Mark Steyn gold to mine for the astute presidential candidate.
"...the present situation reflects the total failure of “you’re not on your own” economics — the delusion of statists that government can insulate millions of people from the vicissitudes of life.... This may or may not be an admirable notion..."
It's admirable only for the naive and those who haven't grown up, for trying to protect others from life's realities creates yet more more people who can't grow and who thus miss out on the richness of life and the character that difficulties produce. Individual character breeds national character. Ours is suffering due to the over-protection of an infantile citizenry.
It's also not admirable because the prime movers of Progressives' "caring" is not true compassion are the desire for control and an elitist attitude that the masses are incapable children. The true opposite of Obama's "We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules" is "you rubes are better off when you are controlled by us and play by our rules".
The reference to “Pass the Parcel" was apt but when I first read of this bailout circle last week, it reminded me more of the Three Stooges "pass the dollar" routine, where each Stooge owed the other a dollar and in the end the first borrower ended up getting his bill back. In our present case, there'll enter a fourth creditor, likely China, who'll not be a Stooge.
Also apt is Steyn's reference to statist government as the final monopoly, something I repeatedly tell my deluded liberal acquaintances, adding only that this monopoly also has guns and jails.
I am going to mine your comment for gold as well. I am a (conservative/Constitutional/non-union) public school teacher - shame I have to even defend myself for my profession. We are "suffering due to the overprotection of an infantile citizenry." I see this everyday. My high school students are so delicate that most do not know how to handle adversity and their shortcomings become my fault. They have not the toughness that is learned through perseverance - not the character, as you mention. And you are so right that this individual character becomes our lack of character. We need the wisdom of James 1. Sadly, a majority of them are the products of broken homes and parents who try to protect them from difficulties, thus rendering them ill-equipped for life. They have learned that if they whine long enough, they will get their way. And, in far too many ways, the educational system accomodates this; many younger teachers are a product of this same mentality.
I have a friend that was a moderate/slightly left-leaning fellow when he was just out of college and I worked with him as fellow engineers. He is now a staunch conservative. I asked him what had happened and his reply was that "as he got older, he got smarter." We need to hasten this process in our society.
I also get tired of being told I am not compassionate. Conservatives give far more time and money to caring for others - in part because we don't believe it is primarily the role of government.
The delusion is only a temporary condition, aided and abetted by a compliant and swooning audience. It should be readily apparent that the man has a purposeful agenda dedicated to the destruction of this society in order to build the latest version of the totalitarian utopia.
We spend a great deal of time propagandizing in front of high school audiences only because the youngsters can be counted on to cheer wildly at his dictatorial genre.
Man your delusional. Obama isn't Stalin, Lenin, Mussolini or Hitler. There is no social dictatorship in the US, only a plutocratic government which caters to any and every possible whim of large business. You know how jobs are created? By demand! Not by tax cuts. Economics 101 dummy. How about Congress bail out the American people instead of the banks?
Martin, tax cuts put more money in peoples' pockets, allowing them to satisfy their demands, thus creating jobs. Congress could bail out the American people by letting us keep what we earn.
"I quote an old joke about the British equivalent of the U.S. antitrust division: “Why is there only one Monopolies Commission?” This is a profound insight into the nature of statism: By definition, there can only be one government — which is why, when it’s “monopolizing,” it should do so only in very limited areas."
Mark, your observation nails the crux of the problem with the latest "czar," who is supposedly to oversee consumer issues. A figuredhead not accountable to Congress for its bureaucratic appropriations will be *deeming* how Americans will or will not spend their own money for goods and services. This power grab by the federal government is a monopoly writ large.
The president of the United States came to Osawatomie, Kan., last week to deliver a speech of such fascinating awfulness archeologists of the future sifting through the rubble of our civilization will surely doubt whether it could really have been delivered by the chief executive of the global superpower in the year 2011.
That's not quite accurate, Mark. Here's what you meant to write:
The president of the United States came to Osawatomie, Kan., last week to deliver a speech of such fascinating awfulness archeologists of the future sifting through the rubble of our civilization will suddenly understand that civilization's collapse was caused by the kind of "thinking" on display from the chief executive of the global superpower in the year 2011.
Yes it was awful. The complete departure from reality is breathtaking, for anyone with two IQ points to rub together:
1) The rich don't pay their fair share, even though they not only pay a disproportionate share of taxes, but also a disproportionate share of their own income.
2) Everyone must pay their "fair share," but the suggestion is that it's only the rich who must do so, not the 47% who pay no federal income taxes.
3) The rich aren't creating enough jobs with the money they're sitting on, so government has to take more from them so it can "invest" in Solyndra and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and Debbie Stabenow's rechargeable batteries (External Link) and Finnish electric car companies and guns for Mexican drug runners.
4) "You're on your own." Would that we were. It used to be understood that "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you," was a wry reflection that the government guy would basically spin his wheels, do nothing, and at least leave you no worse off than you were before. Now when you hear that, you immediately think, "Uh-oh - BOHICA..." External Link
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