The man who knows nothing about business and wealth creation would guarantee a job, an education, health care, a home, and a comfortable retirement to everyone. The man above who produces nothing would use the power of the state to guarantee the appropriation of wealth from producers to consumers. No one calls it Communism or Socialism, however, “from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs” and Obama’s policy stated recently in Cleveland have a distinction without a difference.
Who is going to provide all of the outcomes that Obama effortlessly promises? Who will provision the beneficiaries? Not the government. The government doesn’t create any of those things. The government is just an intermediary that consumes some overhead to manage the transfer of all this guaranteed value from one group of citizens to another. Wealth producers fund Obama’s guarantees–his wealth transfers–to consumers, and they also fund the government overhead that operates the transfer system.
Obama and Congress are free riders in this system. They get paid by wealth producers, and they keep their jobs by buying off the goodwill of government beneficiaries who receive the guaranteed outcomes they promise.
Obama, Congress, and the Executive Branch containing thousands of federal regulators with enforcement powers, have no personal skin in the game. They produce nothing while they wield power, yet the wielding of power actually prolongs and enhances their positions–gets them more power. The reality feedback loop for this system is stacked against producers, it’s disconnected from real cause and effect, it doesn’t respond to real economics, and it cannot produce economic outcomes. Every outcome the government wealth transfer and regulatory system produces is in fact a dislocation from what would occur naturally.
And what would occur naturally, according to Leftist mythology, is a dangerous, racist, hurtful, unjust, mean, nasty, insensitive, polluting, deadly, evil, devastating Republican disaster that must be avoided at any and all cost. Leftist mythology covers a lot to hate, and that’s why they’re so practiced at expressing hatred. You are what you eat.
But the Left thinks this system is just wonderful because they see themselves as saviors from all the squalor that would otherwise exist. Obama and those who uphold his beliefs have no clue about the essential injustice, unworkability, and seriously harmful consequences that their guaranteed outcomes have caused wherever they’ve been previously tried. They zealously believe in a system of thought that prevents them from realizing these truths. Blissfully unaware of the harm their policies cause, with brains washed clean of introspection and critical thought, they think themselves brilliant. The role of savior, the messianic complex, is so captivating to them that it crowds out reality feedback. They never even see their own negative effects.
Our Constitution gave us the tools to prevent this sort of monstrosity from developing. Over two centuries of Supreme Court decisions have largely eviscerated the constitutional protections created by the Founders, and there now exists a very wealthy and self-perpetuating industry of lawyers and courts who are vested in the daily effort to transfer wealth and political empowerment to beneficiaries, and away from producers.
America may have already passed the tipping point where the incentive to produce is so diluted, and the avarice of beneficiaries and their empowering bureaucracy is so ravaging, that the American dream has become a memory.