Obama Misunderstands the Economy
Stay Worried
November 6, 2010 -
by Victor Davis Hanson
Economics 101
What worries me about President Obama is really one general issue: his very concrete enjoyment of the good life as evidenced by his golf outings, Martha’s Vineyard vacations, and imperial entourages that accompany him abroad, and yet his obvious distrust of the private sector and the success of the wealthy. Yet my discomfort here is not even one that arises from an obvious hypocrisy of, say, a Michelle on the 2008 campaign trail lecturing the nation about its meanness or her own previous lack of pride in her country, juxtaposed with her taste for the publicly provided rarefied enjoyments of a Costa del Sol hideaway at a time of recession.
No, my worries run deeper. Apparently, the president is unaware that after some 2,500 years of both experience with and abstract thought about Western national economies, we know that a free, private sector increases the general wealth of a nation, while a statist redistributive state results in a general impoverishment of the population. At the root of that truth is simple human nature — that people wish to further their own interest more fervently than the more abstract public good (e.g., why the renter does not wash the rental car, or why the public restroom is treated differently from its counterpart at home), and can be encouraged to invent, create, and discover which in turn helps the less fortunate, lucky, healthy, or talented.
Texas or California?
We all accept, of course, that the question is not one of a laissez-faire, unchecked robber baron arena, versus a Marxist-Leninist closed economy, but rather in a modern Western liberal state the finer line between a Greece and a Switzerland, or a California and a Texas.
In the former examples, the desire to achieve an equality of result through high taxes, generous public employment, and lavish entitlements destroys incentive in two directions — creating dependency on the part of the more numerous recipients of government largess, and despair among the smaller but more productive sector that sees the fruits of its labor redistributed to others — with all the obligatory state rhetoric about greed and social justice that legitimizes such transfers.
In the latter examples, an equality of opportunity allows citizens to create wealth and capital on the assurances that the incentives for personal gain and retention of profits will result in greater riches for all.
Neither Baron nor Insect
We in America more or less understood that dichotomy, and so neither idolized a Bill Gates or Warren Buffett with titles like count, lord, or baron, nor demonized them with revolutionary spite (i.e., “insect,” “enemy of the people,” or even “greedy” and “selfish”). Instead, we assumed that Buffett had enriched his investors and more or less could not possibly use all the vast billions he accumulated (he, in fact, lived rather modestly and much of his treasure will probably end up in the Gates Foundation). One way or another, it was worth having Microsoft Word with the expectation that the zillionaire Bill Gates’ shower is still no hotter than ours, and his private jet goes not much faster than our own cut-rate Southwest Airlines flights. All that seems simple enough — until now.
So, again, what troubles me is that the president seems unaware of this old divide — that what allowed the pre-presidential Obamas, respectively, to make quite a lot of money as a legislator, author, professor, lawyer, or hospital representative was a vibrant private sector that paid taxes on profits that fueled public spending and employment or made possible an affluent literary and legal world. All that was contingent upon the assurance that an individual would have a good chance of making a profit and keeping it in exchange for incurring the risk of hiring employees and buying new equipment.
Grows on Trees?
Instead, Obama seems to think that making money is a casual enterprise, not nearly so difficult as community organizing, and without the intellectual rigor of academia — as if profits leap out of the head of Zeus. I say that not casually or slanderously, but based on the profile of his cabinet appointments, his and his wife’s various speeches relating Barack Obama’s own decision to shun the supposed easy money of corporate America for more noble community service in Chicago, and a series of troubling ad hoc, off-the-cuff revealing statements like the following:
As a state legislator Barack Obama lamented the civil rights movement’s reliance on the court system to ensure equality-of-result social justice rather than working through legislatures, which were the “actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change.” To Joe Wurzelbacher, he breezily scoffed that “my attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody. I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” When Charlie Gibson pressed presidential candidate Obama on his desire to hike capital gains taxes when historically such policies have decreased aggregate federal revenue, a startled Obama insisted that the punitive notion, not the money, was the real issue: “Well, Charlie, what I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.” And as President Obama, again in an off-handed matter, he suggested that the state might have an interest on what individuals make: “I mean, I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.”
In other words, for most of his life Barack Obama has done quite well without understanding how and why American capital is created, and has enjoyed the lifestyle of the elite in the concrete as much as in the abstract he has questioned its foundations. Does he finally see that the threat of borrowing huge amounts to grow government to redistribute income through higher taxes risks greater impoverishment for all of us, despite the perceived “fairness”? That suspicion alone explains why those with trillions of dollars are sitting on the sidelines despite low interest, low inflation, and a rebounding global economy. In short, millions of profit-makers believe not only will it be harder to make a profit, but far less of it will remain their own— and all the while the president will deprecate the efforts of those who simply wish do well for themselves. With proverbial friends like those, who needs enemies?
Until that mindset changes and can be seen by the public to change, the recession will not so easily end.
Footnotes
Col. Chris Gibson ran a brilliant campaign in New York’s 20th Congressional District; although polls had him initially down by a substantial margin, he handily defeated his opponent and now becomes a U.S. congressman — surely one of the most unique representatives in the House of Representatives: decorated combat veteran, distinguished officer, author, professor, accomplished PhD., and of sterling character. Thanks to readers who followed or donated to his campaign.
Riposte Department
From time to time I try to answer charges to set the record straight as carefully as I can sine ira ac studio.
Thomas Ricks
The military correspondent Thomas Ricks recently wrote an off-handed attack on Carnage and Culture (a near decade after its publication and after over 100 reviews had appraised the book), citing the three-year old smear by Robert Bateman (e.g., “Lt. Col. Bob Bateman, who is both an active-duty officer and an academic with terrific credentials in military history, delivered the coup de grace in a series of articles I hadn’t seen until recently…”) (Such as this one.) Of course, three years ago I responded at length to Bateman’s sloppy “coup de grace,”which was posted on the Soros-sponsored Media Matters website, an unscholarly attack that often indulged in the near obscene (e.g., “pervert,” “feces,” “devil,” etc.). I think Ricks is probably responding not to a book I authored a decade ago, but to a more recent scholarly review I wrote of his Fiasco that faulted his chronic use of unnamed and anonymous sources in offering a dismal picture of any chance of restoration in Iraq. I hold no animosity toward Ricks, but I still feel that Fiasco was neither a scholarly book nor fair in its use of evidence. (By the way, “terrific credentials,” of course, means that in his attack on Carnage and Culture Robert Bateman praised Thomas Ricks and objected to my review of his book.)
He’s Back
About once a year I reply to some silly ad hominem piece Andrew Sullivan writes. The latest: In reply to a statement from radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt that I had met with President Bush, Sullivan now writes: “Maybe this doesn’t surprise you. But ponder its implications. George W. Bush could’ve called any man or woman in the United States to his office to get advice. Anyone in the military, any policy expert, the most knowledgeable American in any industry or field of knowledge. With whom did he apparently spend a lot of time conversing? Hanson, Hewitt, and some other talk radio hosts.”
This is adolescent. George Bush was in office nearly 3,000 days. I met with him 4-5 times, always with a group of historians, never one-on-one, rarely on topics only confined to the Iraq War. He often called in dozens of such groups to discuss books, history, and contemporary events. Somehow those visits translate into some wild theory that Bush did not consult hundreds of military analysts, officers, and planners in his thousands of days of governance.
Once again, I confess I do not understand the strange fits of Andrew Sullivan. He once contemplated the use of nuclear weapons against Saddam Hussein; in his Iraq War zealotry he dreamed of a Noble Prize for George Bush — only to level wild charges of war crimes against dozens of American leaders. Later he peddled despicable rumors about the Palin family pregnancies, cruel and completely erroneous — and this from someone who in the past had pleaded for understanding and a sphere of privacy concerning his own embarrassing sexual escapades, drug arrest, and serial character lapses. His wildly erratic and often gratuitously mean behavior seems inexplicable and well beneath the norms of just those public figures that he so frequently attacks.
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