Barack Obama's Zero Sum World
By Star Parker
TownHall.com
Investopedia defines a “zero sum
game” as “a situation in which one person’s gain is
equivalent to another’s loss, so the net change in
wealth or benefit is zero.”
If a political leader wielding power sees the world
as a zero sum game – gains to one must mean a loss
to another – it is likely that this leader will
promote policies that will limit growth, wealth
creation and innovative problem solving.
What a zero sum worldview will produce more of is
political, class, and ethnic resentment and strife.
It so happens we have a leader today that has this
worldview and his name is Barack Obama. It is not
surprising that today’s world over which he is
presiding, at home and abroad, increasing shows
these characteristics.
President Obama was very candid in a recent
interview with Thomas Friedman of the New York Times
in which he stated his zero sum view of the world.
“Obama made clear,” Friedman writes, “that he is
only going to involve America more deeply in places
like the Middle East to the extent that different
communities there agree to an inclusive politics of
no victor/no vanquished.”
There you have it. No suggestion that there is right
and wrong, or better answers that make everyone
better off and worse answers that don’t. No, in our
president’s take on the world, if there is a winner
who winds up better off there must be a loser who
winds up equally worse off.
The president then made clear that he views the
world through this zero sum lens at home as well as
abroad.
According to him, notes Friedman, “…we (America)
will never realize our full potential unless our two
parties adopt the same outlook we’re asking of
Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds or Israelis and
Palestinians: No victor, no vanquished and work
together.”
This “inclusive” world view, devoid of right and
wrong, true and false, better and worse, stands
starkly in contrast to what Abraham Lincoln had to
say when confronting a nation torn apart by the
question of whether it would tolerate slavery.
“A house divided against itself cannot stand,” said
Lincoln. “I believe this government cannot stand,
permanently, half slave and half free...It will
become all one thing or all the other.”
The president’s “no victor, no vanquished” take on
the world is turning up the flames of the Israeli
Palestinian conflict by legitimizing the falsehood
that if Israelis are better off it means that Arabs
will be worse off.
It perversely forces the Israelis to sit and
negotiate with Hamas – an organization that even the
United States officially designates as a terrorist
organization.
Author George Gilder characterizes the Middle East
conflict as “not between Arab and Jews but between
admiration for achievement, along with a desire to
replicate it, and envy accompanied by violent
resentment.”
Gilder describes how the inflow of Jewish settlers
in the last century transformed Palestine for the
benefit of all.
“Between 1921 and 1943,” he writes, “Jews quadrupled
the number of enterprises, multiplied the number of
jobs by a factor of 10, and increased the level of
capital investment a hundredfold.”
“Far from displacing Arabs,” continues Gilder, “
they (Jews) provided the capital for a major
expansion of Arab farms and enabled a sevenfold rise
in Arab population by 1948.”
Zero sum politics plays out in similarly destructive
ways in our own country. Instead of building a
culture of achievement and responsibility,
politicians of the left stoke grievances of low
income Americans, inspire envy and resentment, and
teach that the poor are poor because the rich are
rich.
By stoking these politics of envy and victimhood,
it’s the politicians, at home and abroad, who grow
powerful and wealthy. The disenfranchised languish
as political pawns, never hearing the truth that
life is about making correct personal choices in an
imperfect world.