“The 65% of our population who are imbeciles really love it, so it must be best!”
– Brett Stevens (in full-metal sarcasm mode) (HT:Amerika.org)
I’ll let Sir Charles Darwin explain why the entire premise of Barack Obama’s recent smug-fest campaign ad known as a State of The Union Address was an utter joke. Barack Obama thinks a welfare state with more tentacles than a sea monster from a Homeric Epic can give us an economy that is built to last. Darwin would explain reality as follows.
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”
So if that VIC-20 I had in my room, (The one I used to stash my copies of Street Chopper Magazine under when I was 12) had been built to last, would it be doing me very much good? Of course not, but that seems to be the prevailing economic zeitgeist of the Obama Whitehouse. If he can just prevent the future from taking place, no more travel agents will lose their jobs to Internet Apps on Orbitz.com. And he promises to the absolute best he can to make this happen to the American People.
The future frightens the citizens of an economically weak and culturally dying nation. A savvy political leader sees this and plays to these fears. Government can make this scary future go away, but only if it’s given more and more power to do all that is necessary. But for all the power this government assumes nothing is ever their fault. As Derek Thompson of The Atlantic put it.
Americans are struggling, Obama said, not only because of the credit crunch of the Great Recession, but also because of efficiency monster that delivered a greater recession long before 2007. Manufacturing jobs were already disappearing, wages were already stagnating, technology was already eating our work, medical and education prices were already galloping while earnings were trotting.
How do you fix a problem like the greater recession and income inequality? The honest, realistic answer is that solving such a problem is likely beyond the reach of a president or Congress. But the purpose of the State of the Union is precisely to make oversized promises that Congress can underdeliver, so the president offered a laundry-list of measures guaranteed to please liberals and infuriate conservatives for basically the same reason: They cost money.
So there it is. The problems Barack Obama attempts to fix are not the sort any government should be attempting to intervene in. Other nations of the world really do work harder, demand less in remuneration, and require less out of employers that work there than the workers and government of the United States. Machines and algorithms really do perform precise and highly detail-oriented tasks better than any human being outside the top 1% in agility and mental acuity. No Internet App ever requires health insurance or sick leave. These are realities, not lies told by the E-VIL Mitt Romney and his vile minions at Bain Capital.
What Barack Obama’s economy that is built to last would amount to is a museum. It would be a snapshot of a former time when his grandfather really did perform hard manual labor on a WWII assembly line. The government would curate that museum and dust off the exhibits if they got a bit run down. The government would also soon find itself having to buy all the products because they were years behind anything that people would ever want to purchase or own. The museum would eventually close when every patron the museum wanted to charge for admission (i.e. tax) was too broke to afford it and clamoring for a job on the staff (i.e. a tax-break, a grant or a bailout).
This is why Indiana Governor, Mitch Daniels, said more in his 10-minute response than President Barack Obama has said in 3-plus years of droning, atonal Un-Leadership.
“In word and deed, the President and his allies tell us that we just cannot handle ourselves in this complex, perilous world without their benevolent protection. Left to ourselves, we might pick the wrong health insurance, the wrong mortgage, the wrong school for our kids; why, unless they stop us, we might pick the wrong light bulb!
And that is the essence of the Un-Leadership Barack Obama has provided for the last three years. He doesn’t call on all Americans to look upon government so that he can save them. He calls on all Americans to look upon government so that they will forget that there is any such thing as an intelligent alternative. This is a call for the peasants to return to their serfdom, for the low-born to pay their Dhimmitude, for Americans to turn into something lesser.
Our President, for the sake of improving his own odds, calls upon us to do the things that will make us more dependent upon others. Just get on the team. Just line up for the program. Forget about adapting to change. And most of all; forget the implicit prediction that Charles Darwin offers will befall those who forget how to adapt to the rapid steady-state of change all around us.
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