Tuesday, June 12, 2012
It bothers me a little when conservatives call Barack
Obama a “socialist.” He certainly is an enemy of the free market, and wants
politicians and bureaucrats to make the fundamental decisions about the
economy. But that does not mean that he wants government ownership of the means
of production, which has long been a standard definition of socialism.
What President Obama has been pushing for, and moving
toward, is more insidious: government control of the economy, while leaving
ownership in private hands. That way, politicians get to call the shots, but,
when their bright ideas lead to disaster, they can always blame those who own
businesses in the private sector.
Politically, it is heads-I-win when things go right, and
tails-you-lose when things go wrong. This is far preferable, from Obama’s point
of view, since it gives him a variety of scapegoats for all his failed
policies, so that he no longer has to use President Bush as a scapegoat all the
time.
Government ownership of the means of production means
that politicians also own the consequences of their policies, and have to face
responsibility when those consequences are disastrous — something that Barack
Obama avoids like the plague.
Thus the Obama administration can arbitrarily force
insurance companies to cover the children of their customers until the children
are 26 years old. Obviously, this creates favorable publicity for President
Obama. But if this and other government edicts cause insurance premiums to
rise, then that is something that can be blamed on the “greed” of the insurance
companies.
The same principle, or lack of principle, applies to many
other privately owned businesses. It is a very successful political ploy that can
be adapted to all sorts of situations.
One of the reasons why both pro-Obama and anti-Obama
observers may be reluctant to see him as fascist is that both tend to accept
the prevailing notion that fascism is on the political right, while it is
obvious that Obama is on the political left.
Back in the 1920s, however, when fascism was a new
political development, it was widely — and correctly — regarded as being on the
political left. Jonah Goldberg’s great book Liberal Fascism cites overwhelming
evidence of the fascists’ consistent pursuit of the goals of the Left, and of
the Left’s embrace of the fascists during the 1920s.
Mussolini, the originator of fascism, was lionized by the
Left, both in Europe and in America, during the 1920s. Even Hitler, who adopted
fascist ideas in the 1920s, was seen by some, including W. E. B. Du Bois, as a
man of the Left.
It was in the 1930s, when ugly internal and international
actions by Hitler and Mussolini repelled the world, that the Left distanced
itself from fascism and its Nazi offshoot — and verbally transferred these
totalitarian dictatorships to the Right, saddling their opponents with these
pariahs.
What socialism, fascism, and other ideologies of the Left
have in common is an assumption that some very wise people — like themselves —
need to take decisions out of the hands of lesser people, i.e., the rest of us,
and impose those decisions by government fiat.
The vision of those of the Left is not only a vision of
the world, but also a vision of themselves as superior beings pursuing superior
ends. In the United States, however, this vision conflicts with a Constitution
that begins, “We, the People . . . ”
That is why the Left has for more than a century been
trying to get the Constitution’s limitations on government loosened or evaded
by judges’ new interpretations, based on notions of “a living Constitution”
that will take decisions out of the hands of “We, the People,” and transfer
those decisions to our betters.
The self-flattery of the vision of the Left also gives
its true believers a huge ego stake in that vision, which means that mere facts
are unlikely to make them reconsider — regardless of what evidence piles up
against the vision of the Left, and regardless of its disastrous consequences.
Only our own awareness of the huge stakes involved can
save us from the rampaging presumptions of our betters, whether they are called
socialists or fascists. So long as we buy their heady rhetoric, we are selling
our birthright of freedom.
No comments:
Post a Comment