Will Obama Destroy Socialism?
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
You can make corncob pipes, eighteen wheel trucks
or microprocessors-- but you can't make jobs. Jobs
are not a commodity or a service. They cannot be
created independently through a job creating
program. Rather they are the side-effect of a
working economy. Trying to shortcut the economy with
job creation programs is like trying to run a fruit
orchard by neglecting the trees and instead buying
fruit at inflated prices to resell to your customers
at a lower price. It's feasible, but not
sustainable.
The government can promote job creation through
subsidized education and training, but there is a
ceiling on such efforts, since government programs
still have to be paid for through taxation. It can
encourage companies to do business locally through
tax breaks, though this is an admission that the tax
rates are an obstacle to job growth. But what it
cannot do is create jobs out of whole cloth. Except
for government jobs.
Just about anyone in the White House this term would
have launched job creation programs. And like most
such efforts they would have been a wash. But Barack
Hussein Obama's approach was different in that he
did not even pretend to make the effort. His
economic programs went by business friendly names,
but invariably turned out to be concerned with only
one kind of job creation. The creation of public
sector jobs.
The spoils system has a long history in American
politics, but it was never as spoiled as all this.
There is no parallel in American history for the
spoils system being used not just to rotate out
supporters of the old administration and replace
them with your lackeys, but to hijack the economy as
your own spoils system to the tune of trillions of
dollars.
Obama responded to an economic crisis by working to
create two kinds of jobs. Government and union jobs.
This was not about anything as simple as rewarding
his supporters. The Black community got very little
in exchange for supporting him. The Hispanic
community similarly ended up with some token
appointments, but not much to show for it. This was
about shifting jobs from the private sector into the
public sector and its feeders. To manufacture the
types of jobs that feed money back into the
Democratic party and expand the scope of the
government bureaucracy.
No previous administration has as thoroughly
disdained and tried to crush the private sector. But
then none of them were nearly as clueless or
irresponsible when it come to basic economics. The
Democrats who had spent eight years mocking
Reaganomics, practiced a Krugmanonics that treated
money like an imaginary number. In Krugmanomics
wealth is created through spending, and poverty is
created by practicing wise fiscal management. The
whole premise of Krugmanomics makes no sense, unless
you have already decided that the private sector is
a mythical beast with no room in the socialist
bestiary.
This wasn't even Keynesian, it most closely
resembled the Bolshevik radicalism that destroyed
the Russian economy, right down to the belated
realization that only by assigning some limited role
to the private sector could the situation be
salvaged. Obama's pre-election turn echoes Lenin's
New Economic Program. But like Lenin, Obama hasn't
embraced the free market. All he has done is tried
to retreat to it after the spend and burn economics
of his brightest radicals had ignited too much
public fury.
Obama has only one idea. The same one idea that the
left has beaten into the ground repeatedly. The
monopolization of power. This monopolization is
disguised behind organizations claiming to represent
the people, community activists, unions and public
interest lobbies, whose only message is the vital
necessity of a government monopoly in every economic
area of life.
It's the old Soviet strategy writ large. Every
red error brought back to life and pushed forward
with cunning and brute force, but no understanding
of why it failed last time around. The slower
transition of Wells' "Open Conspiracy" does not make
them any better at running a country, than the
radical armed revolts of the Bolsheviks did.
Repeating the same mistakes at 1/20th the speed does
not lead to a better outcome. Only to more chances
to see that they are going the wrong way.
The left's total abandonment of individual choice,
its insistence that a moral society can only come
from total submission to the rule of the
enlightened, does not just lead to tyranny, but to
economic disaster. The last term has been another
reminder of why the enlightened are not qualified to
to run every aspect of a society, and why economic
collectivism is no substitute for individualism. A
healthy society gains its energy from individual
decision making, a diversity of choices leading to a
diversity of outcomes. An unhealthy one is tightly
constrained by the five or ten year plan of a
dictator and his cronies.
The left has never questioned the rightness of its
destination, only the best way to get there. And
that is its greatest blind spot. Within the left
there has been debate on the speed of the transition
and the best way to achieve it. Violent revolution
or a slow takeover from within. Stamp out the
bourgeoisie or brainwash their children into joining
your ranks. But these concerns with tactics and the
political correctness of one approach over another,
always end up overlooking the larger questions.
Because it is taken for granted that the system of
collective tyranny they champion is bound to work.
Fanatics rarely question their own motives or the
rightness of their beliefs. And the left breeds that
brand of fanaticism the way the sewers of Paris bred
rats. That makes them capable of ruthlessly pursuing
a course, but not of recognizing that the course
itself is wrong. The left spends so much time
fighting to seize a country, unable to realize that
it cannot keep it as anything more than a backward
dictatorship with nuclear weapons and widespread
hunger.
The fanatic's greatest error is to believe that he
shapes reality, rather than reality shaping him. And
that is an error which Obama catastrophically fell
into. The more his imagemakers surrounded him with
an aura of invincibility, the less aware he and they
became of the possibility of failure. The very halo
that they planted on his head, made his abuses of
power inevitable, and also his downfall. To pose in
a halo is to deny human error. And that denial of
human error by those who are born to the red leads
the left to ideological disputes that can only be
settled with purges and to economic disasters that
cannot happen because their politically correct
positions have endowed them with a sense of
inevitable historical destiny.
The manifest destiny of socialism has been the
left's greatest article of faith. It says that one
way or another they must win. The stages of history
make it inevitable. That knowledge of inevitable
progression, from feudalism to capitalism to
socialism blinds them to the realization that their
way is nothing more than feudalism under a red flag.
Which is exactly what it became in the Soviet Union
and the People's Republic of China.
Obama's greatest asset was that sense of
inevitability which he projected as confidence. But
that confidence is now at odds with a country where
massive unemployment has led to resentment of his
Versailles lifestyle, the parties, globe trotting
tours and vacations more appropriate to royalty,
than the elected official of a republic. The public
has never shared the left's sense of historical
inevitability. It does not understand why Obama is
so cheerful when the rest of the country is
suffering. It is less interested in Isms, than in
functionality. And the state of nation under Obama
is a state of extreme dysfunction.
That dysfunction is causing Americans to question
many elements of the left's slow takeover, elements
that they would have left alone if the radicalism of
their new masters had not occasioned a blowback that
is sweeping well beyond a mere repeal of the Obama
years. The media had positioned Obama as a new FDR,
but instead he is emerging as the Anti-FDR. Not the
man who will sell Americans on socialism, but the
man who will finally turn them against it.
The left mistook the economic disaster they had
orchestrated as the end of capitalism. It was
however a premature celebration. While the media
rebukes the public for its glumness, its
unwillingness to see that the time of hope and
change means that the economy no longer matters,
that a bad economy becomes a good one if we say so--
the recovery that comes may be an ideological one. A
recovery from the ideology which first brought on
the disaster. While the left had hoped to use the
economy to destroy the free market as a vital force,
it may be that their own attempt to do so will
instead destroy socialism.