Obama Inaugural Disguises Collectivism as Liberty

 

IBDEditorials.com

Socialism: Tuesday's inaugural address included a big dollop of "give capitalism its due." But it was just a spoonful of sugar to help Americans swallow their collectivist medicine.

America is on "a never-ending journey," President Obama declared, using a metaphor that makes sense for the biggest-spending chief executive in the history of mankind; never-ending journeys never run into a Day of Reckoning.

According to this president, "being true to our founding documents ... does not mean we all define liberty in exactly the same way." Liberty, we are to believe, is an eye-of-the-beholder proposition.

This is what we are to have in mind as we swallow the "ask not what your country" line of Obama's address: "preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action."

In other words, there is no real liberty without big government. Or perhaps we should turn to Orwell's 1984 to break the code: "Freedom Is Slavery."

Obama says he's all for entrepreneurs, Grandma and her apple pie, but "a free market only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play."

Talk to the millions of victims of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Mr. President, the monstrous public-private hybrids designed by government with rules to suffocate competition and fair play among banks in the name of redistributing income via residential real estate.

Economic illiteracy is so rampant today that the Mitt Romneys of the country, not the anti-market rulemakers in government, get blamed for the Fannie/Freddie-driven financial crisis of 2008.

Americans, Obama said, possess "an endless capacity for risk" and "we have never relinquished our skepticism of central authority, nor have we succumbed to the fiction that all society's ills can be cured through government alone. Our celebration of initiative and enterprise, our insistence on hard work and personal responsibility — these are constants in our character."

It's all terrific lip service to the principles of economic freedom. But it was followed by the declaration that "we reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future."

Translation: We can have our fiscal cake and eat it too. Forget $16.5 trillion in national debt. Forget trillion-dollar deficits. Forget government hyper-spending's toll on the private sector.

The executive branch has no intention over the next four years of reforming — or, more correctly, saving from bankruptcy— our wasteful entitlement programs. Indeed, ObamaCare is a huge new entitlement heaved on to the taxpayers' backs.

Lady Thatcher warned that socialists "always run out of other people's money." The president has made it clear he is nowhere near to being finished pursuing collectivism in the name of individual freedom.