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Sunday, June 20, 2010

What Obama Doesn't Understand

I wrote a blog post earlier titled “can somebody please tell Obama that this isn’t Europe”; it seems nobody took me up on my offer. The reaction of the American people – when faced with economic disasters – should show Obama that we, as a nation, are distinct in culture and attitude toward what we think the state should do for us.

One of the world’s largest recessions hit in 2007, and is continuing to ravage markets and the general economy, even today. Huge banking firms have been close to collapse or actually collapsed; the recent BP oil disaster will ravage the Gulf of Mexico for years to come; even General Motors and Chrysler were going under.

A people with socialist leanings – such as many European countries – would have cried “state intervention!” They would have deplored the “crass greed” of “unregulated and unrepentant capitalism” that caused such destruction. This is also what the Marxists would argue.

But what did the American people demand? We didn’t turn to the state; there were no cries of “state intervention”; quite the contrary, our response was “less state intervention”. Why was our response so different to the responses of the people in Europe?

I argue that the answer lies in our history as a nation. Entrepreneurship is a part of American society, indeed, a part of American culture. Communism gave you the dull concrete tower blocks of Eastern Europe and Russia; free-market capitalism gives you the modern American city.

We are now at a crossroads in our history. The Obama administration has spent $1 trillion on an economic stimulus, propped up failing companies and banks, as well as introduced forced-purchase health care reform. He has also recently appropriated $20 billion dollars, without decree of law, from a private company.

Obama – whether he is a socialist or not – is definitely increasing the role of government in our lives. What he doesn’t seem to understand is that we accept entrepreneurship, competition, and free market economics as a part of our heritage and culture: this necessarily means that we prefer a small sized government that only helps maintain a framework where the private sector can work; not where the government is the main player.

Either we say no to Obamanomics, or we go down the road where all the European countries are headed: bankruptcy and then serfdom.
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