PICTURE OF THE DAY

Modern princesses

OBAMA THE SOCIALIST?

“A group of us got together and decided we would rather have your wealth in our pockets than your wealth in your pockets.”

There’s a funny little exchange that often happens on political blogs. Someone will say President Obama is a socialist, and at least one lefty will respond that is simply not the case. Usually they do so in insulted, angry tones. This is interesting to me for two reasons.

First, the response presumes that they at least think other people consider socialism bad. That if it became widely perceived that President Obama was a socialist, then that will hurt him politically. They seem to realize that the American people do not like socialists and really open socialism.

The second is a bit more complex. I believe its fairly obvious that President Obama is a socialist, he doesn’t even try to hide it. He specifically and openly says things like “It’s not that I want to punish your success; I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you that they’ve got a chance to success, too. I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” He makes no secret of his continual push to take money from the wealthy and give it to other people.

Further, President Obama has been absolutely clear that he believes the economy is shaped by government, and needs to be more closely controlled. Over at Powerline, Paul Mirengoff has been reading the book Radical In Chief by Stanley Kurtz, the man who worked so hard trying to dig up information on President Obama’s past before the 2008 election. Mirengoff writes:

Kurtz has persuaded me that Obama probably is a socialist. Before reading his book, I did not believe this to be the case.

He examines both President Obama’s actions and philosophies over the years, from what little we know about his college past (in his books) through the present day. His entire legislative and pre-government past has been shaped by socialist themes and efforts. His present governing style is still shaped by these themes, as are most of his speeches. Even in speeches when he tries to talk about the free market and business, he shapes it in terms of how government acts and what government does to bring about the desired results.

Now, what the left responds when they hear Obama called a socialist is that he’s been more business friendly than any other president they know of. That he’s been working with big corporations, that he’s clearly no socialist at all. Which is partly true: President Obama did let Big Insurance help craft the Government Health Insurance Takeover act to best benefit them. He did work closely with Goldman Sachs and pack his advisers with their cronies. He has been working closely with corporations. That’s why I consider what others call “crony capitalism” to be much closer to National Socialism. At least some on the left are frustrated by the fact that President Obama isn’t being the socialist they want and likely hoped he’d be.

To understand this, you have to examine definition and expectations. Leftists seem to define socialism as sort of a anti-corporation total government lockdown and absolute control of every business. And they do so in such a way that any work with or that benefits corporations must by definition negate the possibility that someone can be socialist. They expect that a socialist would be totally focused on redistribution of wealth and command economy, and if they are not, then they must not be socialist.

The problem is, socialism doesn’t all fit in one box, and you can be an inconsistent or limited socialist without failing entirely to be one. President Obama cannot suddenly command all businesses to be controlled by the state, he’s under restrictions by the other parts of government, law, and wanting to be reelected. But that’s the point. As Jay Cost points out:

The progressive ideology dating back to the turn of the last century, and in which Obama is comfortably situated, was never really about overturning the established order, but rather in co-opting it.

Socialism as it works out in the United States isn’t like after some grand revolution but rather is something you step by step implement by working within the system and corrupting it. Cost goes on to explain that Obama’s socialism is a bit different than, say, Marx:

It’s not just that Obama is a big government guy in the progressive tradition, which conservatives have opposed for more than a century. It’s also that he’s a client guy, meaning that his idea of big government inevitably has special payoffs hidden in it somewhere.

So like there’s been Maoism and Marxism and Leninism, we now have Obamanism, a new blend of the stuff. He’s not out to destroy capitalism, he’s out to reshape it into socialism. At his HQ, Ace puts it this way:

If a guy comes over to your business and begins demanding that you do x and pay y tithe to group z, and is all up in your grill about it, you’d probably either call the cops or spare them the trouble by getting out your gun and telling the miscreant to remove himself from your site or be removed from the earth.

But these cats get a degree in Public Policy and worm themselves up the Media-Distributionist Complex, and suddenly that behavior isn’t merely legal — now they’ve got the coercive force of the government on their side.

And then they ask: What’s the problem? I’m smart. You’re not as smart. I am telling you how to better allocate your small pile of money for the benefit of society; and sure, it just so happens my salary is coming out of a skim from your wealth.

Why don’t you thank me for telling you how to best direct your own resources, instead of being all angry about it?

They just don’t get it and never will.

Its a divergence of worldviews that’s really stark. Democrats used to be the party of small government, states rights, and constitutional protections, and they stayed that way through the progressivism of Wilson, and then with FDR started to move to the left, and by the time McGovern won in 1972, had given up entirely the old school. Sure, there were still some old school Democrats in the party, like Zell Miller, but they were the dinosaurs, left behind by the push for progressivism.

And when President Obama won, they thought that they’d finally won everything and could take off the mask. No more hiding behind a facade of free market concepts, they could cut loose and really be openly socialist. But they couldn’t, with the restrictions of the system, directly implement socialism. And when they tried to get their first step to socialized medicine implemented, they ran into opposition, which they characterized as the last, obsolete dying throes of the conservative movement they’d totally defeated.

And their followers on the left see this as too slow, too limited, too much a failure to do what they want. So they characterize this as not socialist at all, because its not socialist enough, fast enough.

ASBESTOS HYPOCRISY

“I’m sure the nonpartisan League of Women Vultures has been gearing up to run ads showing asbestos victims complaining about Lizzy”

Having run a Democrat so obnoxious, arrogant and unlikable last time that Massachusetts voters chose a Republican instead, the Democrats tried to find a more likable and populist candidate to face Scott Brown. They chose Elizabeth Warren, who then proceeded to claim that she created the Occupy Movement (back when it was slightly popular) and has been running on being an advocate for consumers and the little guy.

And how we hear news that as a lawyer, she helped corporations avoid asbestos lawsuits. Holly Robichaud writes at the Boston Herald:

What did Lizzy do to earn $44,000 in compensation from the insurance company? She made it harder for claimants to collect. Warren helped establish the bankruptcy strategy for companies to avoid crushing lawsuits. In short, go bankrupt to avoid paying victims.

In court briefings, she supported the effort to protect Travelers Insurance from future lawsuits after agreeing to a $500 million settlement with asbestos plaintiffs.

Supposedly President Obama considered Elizabeth Warren for a cabinet position but realized she’d never survive the confirmation process. This kind of news doesn’t exactly help with her “consumer advocate, damn the corporations” campaign, assuming it gets anywhere past the anti-Democrat Herald.

And while I can’t help but note the callous hypocrisy, I don’t really have much of a problem with Ms Warren’s previous work. The Mesothelioma/Asbestos lawsuits and scare is largely a scam. While it has been shown that people exposed to asbestos do have a slightly higher rate of lung cancer, that’s only from airborne asbestos, and generally if you leave it lie, it won’t cause any problems.

But asbestos is one of those sweet money makers that lawyers found in the 80s and they got the consumer advocate groups and legacy media behind them to create a public perception that this stuff is like plutonium: get near it and die. So now, if there’s any in your house or business in any form, you clear it out, even if the law doesn’t require you to. To avoid the lawsuits.

And its not cheap to get that stuff cleared out. You can’t just have the janitorial service or maintainance team deal with the problem. You have to hire a specialist to come and do it according to special government-mandated codes, which costs tens of thousands of dollars a day. They wall off the area with plastic and seal it up and even put up showers and blowers, and wear special outfits and have to get a special license. Its a whole industry now, and it doesn’t come cheap.

Asbestos tiles are harmless until you start breaking them apart and cutting them, because they don’t put anything in the air. Insulation can even be safe if you leave it alone, which is almost always what happens with insulation; its inside walls and ceilings, not out being stepped on and stirred up. But they have to go, and they have to go at the expense of a business who has had them for decades without incident because otherwise someone will sue for the GDP of a small country.

So Ms Warren helped businesses avoid the ambulance chasers who’ve been advertising for a class action lawsuit over mesothelioma for thirty years on television? That’s actually a mark in her favor from where I sit.

OF COST AND FALLACY

“At some point, you are charging enough tuition.”

Question: What does it take for academics at major universities decide that government is getting too big and has too much power?
Answer: When it threatens their money.

President Obama recently brought up a plan that would penalize universities and colleges that did not contain tuition costs by reducing federal funds. This comes at the same time as states are trying to control debt and have reduced state funds for these institutions as well. The Associated Press reports that academics are displeased:

The reality, said Illinois State’s Al Bowman, is that simple changes cannot easily overcome deficits at many public schools. He said he was happy to hear Obama, in a speech Friday at the University of Michigan, urge state-level support of public universities. But, Bowman said, given the decreases in state aid, tying federal support to tuition prices is a product of fuzzy math.
…
At Washington, President Mike Young said Obama showed he did not understand how the budgets of public universities work.

Young said the total cost to educate college students in his state, which is paid for by both tuition and state government dollars, has gone down because of efficiencies on campus. While universities are tightening costs, the state is cutting their subsidies and authorizing tuition increases to make up for the loss.

“They really should know better,” Young said. “This really is political theater of the worst sort.”
Obama’s plan would need approval by Congress, a hard sell in an atmosphere of partisan gridlock.

Now, ordinarily you can rely on left-tending academia to welcome greater government interference in an economy and greater government power, but in this case, its affecting their bottom line. So now instead of enthusiastic support, they are complaining that this is just a stunt, simply grandstanding for voter support.

And there’s good reason to think so. When he spoke at a college recently, President Obama told the students: “We are putting colleges on notice, you can’t assume that you’ll just jack up tuition every single year. If you can’t stop tuition from going up, then the funding you get from taxpayers each year will go down.”

Now, as the AP story notes, President Obama needs congressional approval to do this legally, but the academics should know better: he’s shown over and over he’s more than willing to ignore the constitution and implement rules and changes without congressional approval.

Still, I suspect they’re right, that this is just theater. I doubt President Obama has the slightest inclination to hurt or limit money going to academia, but it sounds good to students who think that government orders fix everything. You probably remember it from your youth. When you saw a problem for the first time, you demanded that “someone do something” and imagined what it would be like if only the right sort were in government and forced the bad guys to change or stop.

So when President Obama stands in front of college students and yells about how he’ll make those dirty colleges stop charging so much, he got applause and smiles. That fits how they think the world works at that age, and President Obama never grew out of it.

Its true that colleges and universities charge too much, and waste a lot of the money they get. They pay people too much, overload their administration massively, have incredibly expensive campuses and facilities, and keep asking for more, while far too often delivering an essentially awful product. I’ve written about how I think that ought to be addressed, and I think its going to change in the future.

But what strikes me is this insistence that everyone should go to college, that its not just some kind of human right but a critical necessity for any possible future. And its a common theme among the very poor to think that if only you can get to college, you’ll get out of poverty and hit the good life. And that can happen; in fact I suspect if the student and his parents work hard and sacrifice to get that kid through college, they will do well and get out of poverty.

But was it the education, or the drive to succeed and work hard? Was it the classes he took or the dedication to finish and excel? Rich people tend to think hard work gets you success, if you ask them. I doubt its all one or the other, but of the two, hard work is certainly the greater contribution.

Its this presumption of success and wealth by college education that’s driving the occupy movement. Colleges aren’t supposed to be really expensive trade schools, you don’t get a liberal arts education so you can get a better job. But that’s what they’re viewed as, and if you don’t get that six figure salary and bonus upon graduation, well they throw a tantrum.

Not everyone ought to go to college. Most people probably shouldn’t bother with higher education. You don’t need it for most jobs, even the ones that claim you do. And even if you did, often you an work through a job from the starting floor and get that education in practice.

We need bus drivers and long haul truckers and mechanics and plumbers and burger flippers, too. Society cannot function if its entire workforce is an elite high education cadre. We can’t all be dentists and lawyers, we need carpenters and bricklayers, too. In fact, we probably need them more. What’s more critical in your life: that your streets aren’t trashed and your house stays standing or that you have perfect teeth and can sue when you don’t?

There’s nothing shameful about having a job like miner or steelworker, its just as noble and meaningful as surgeon or engineer – perhaps more so, at times. The brain surgeon needs someone to build that operating theater and make his tools. Without them he’s just a guy with a lot of knowledge. This presumption that you have to make a lot of money and do a high profile job to be worth anything is not just stupid, its corrosive. The idea of work goes from something constructive and beneficial to your fellow man to status and what you personally get out of it.

And that’s what’s behind this push for everyone to get a college education and to make it ever cheaper and even free. If its that good, its worth paying for, and its worth working hard to be able to pay for, at jobs that aren’t so elite.