Obama's Economic Collective

President Obama's recent remarks about how people didn't do things on their own is not the first time he has slammed individualism, and raised the specter of a collectivist-thinking mind. "If you’ve got a business," he said, "you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen," he said, in his now famous remarks on interdependency.

In December of 2011, at a speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, Obama said that a free market "speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government." But he followed that by saying, "It doesn’t work. It has never worked."

He went on with other remarks: 

• "We simply cannot return to this brand of 'you’re on your own' economics if we’re serious about rebuilding the middle class in this country." 
• 'It results in an economy that invests too little in its people and in its future."
• " I’m here in Kansas to reaffirm my deep conviction that we’re greater together than we are on our own."
• "Factories where people thought they would retire suddenly picked up and went overseas, where workers were cheaper."

These remarks are the message of 'social justice' that the President has worked for his entire political life. But if you're not "on your own", where are you? Are you in a work environment made impossible for management by government regulations?

How does an economy "invest in its people"? I worked in a profit-sharing company where the idea was that we were greater together. But the slackers always lowered my shares and sometimes left me with nothing. If I had owned my own shop and my own welder I would have made more money, so how was standing in that factory part of being something "greater"?

And the only reason for a factory to go where wages are cheaper, is because something is preventing them from paying lower wages here, thereby keeping the jobs here. You can't have that fact both ways. It's either-or.

The President wants an America in which everyone plays by the same rules, as he said in his 2012 State of the Union Address, which was--over and over again--about 'economic fairness'. Yet, he injects tax-payer's money into companies he likes, in order to change the competition in the supply-and-demand market.

Like all good progressives Mr. Obama wants to see the playing field change. So is must be asked, what does he think is happening when an upstart company makes big inroads into someone else's industry? The only true 'economic justice' to be had is when the distribution of capital moves from what the buyers wanted to what they want now. That is not something that can be forced by government. E-85 was mandated by the Alternative Motor Fuels Act of 1988, 24 years ago. Yet in most parts of the nation, you have to go online to look for stations that sell it.

What if government could force a market to rise from little—or from nothing? "We are all painfully aware of the Soviet style mandate that requires 10% of petroleum to be comprised of ethanol.  This unconstitutional mandate has killed jobs, driven up the cost of fuel and food, lowered gas mileage, and damaged car engines," said RS RedState.

Power Industry News wrote that "The Environmental Protection Agency has slapped a $6.8 million penalty on oil refiners for not blending cellulosic ethanol into gasoline, jet fuel and other products. [C]ellulosic ethanol does not exist. It remains a fantasy fuel. EPA might as well mandate that Exxon hire leprechauns. So far this year, just as in 2011, the supply of cellulosic bio fuel in gallons totals zero." [Emphasis added]

Is it fair for a President--or anyone who controls the tax purse--to determine what should be forced on the unconsuming public? Do you not think that $6.8M penalty doesn't mean jobs are lost? What about a safe pipeline not allowed from Canada, and wells not drilled in the Gulf, and ore mines not mined in Alaska? Why are those concepts of 'economic justice' the very sort this President destroys?

If the rules of the market do not "speak" to rugged individualism, why destroy individualism? Why not destroy the rules that prevent individualism in the market? Why not create rules that allow competition?

© Curtis Edward Clark 2012

Obama Economics is Artificially Hobbesian

     We are not flawed by nature, as Hobbes believed; yet we are not the way nature intended, either. 'Natural law', on which even the UN Charter is partly based, doesn't allow for such things as jihad, no matter what Hobbes may have thought about man being in a constant state of war.  
     It was Locke whose ideas were on the money, and from which were derived the Bill of Rights, in which the Ninth Amendment states that we still retain those natural rights which are not enumerated in the other Amendments. http://teapartyoriginalism.blogspot.com/…
     If you believe in Hobbes, you can accept the idea, if not the form, of jihad. If you believe in Jefferson's version of natural law, jihad is an abomination. When we literally had our gun sights on Osama bin Laden and our men were told to stand down and not take him out, that was an abomination; by the same logic that was used, we would not have killed Hitler in 1939, when he invaded Czechoslovakia and Poland.
     The 'command economics' of the Obama Administration and some similar actions in previous administrations are an abomination against the Ninth Amendment. They put Americans in a state of war against other Americans--as all command economics have done. The most famous of them, of course, are Social Security and Medicare; but the Tea Party, nor other conservatives, are calling for their abolition. They merely want to make them smaller, or in the case of S.S., to privatize it. That doesn't remove it from the field of command economics.
     No, we are are not acting in the way nature intended, so we are not the way nature intended us to be. We are fulfilling in many ways the wrongful description of being a species always at war with itself, because we are not listening to John Locke who told us "...that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions."
     "...command economies are unable to efficiently allocate goods because of the knowledge problem - the central planner's inability to discern how much of a good should be produced. Shortages and surpluses are a common consequence of command economies." Investopedia
     Yet, our government under President Obama is now telling us how much coal, versus how much oil, versus how much nuclear, versus how much "green" electricity we are to produce. It has (as of this writing) approved only one permit for oil drilling in the Gulf since the BP spill. Obama hates coal and says there is no such thing as 'clean' burning of it; nuclear reactors are off the table; and yet this Administration has given hundreds of millions to certain cities to build "recharching" stations for the coming of the electric car--which the government is "commanding" be built.
   This administration is even mandating the demise of the incandescent light bulb so that America doesn't have to produce any new electricity--even when  they are pebble bed modular reactors, very safe and extremely cheap.
     The idea is to maintain the current levels of electric usage, even while consumers know of much less expensive ways to run an economy:
1>produce more electricity, thereby putting more people to work and lowering the cost of power;
2>quit telling us how to use our capital, which only creates an artificial but untrue proof of Hobbe's war among men.   Or perhaps it isn't true that men such as Obama, Harding, FDR, and Hillary Clinton (Clinton-care) are not true Hobbesians. Maybe they think Hobbes was correct and simply "work" his system as if no systems with built-in justice existed:
     "Locke's state of nature, however, does contain right and wrong, and so natural rights. Thus, 'to secure these Rights, governments are instituted among men.'". Joseph J. Ellis
     Governments ought not be 'secured' in order to institute intellectual and economic wars among men, but to prevent them with open markets of ideas and goods. If we continue on the Obama Road to ruin, our great-grandchildren will be burning candles and wondering why the word "I" has been banned.

© Curtis Edward Clark 2011
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