The Social-Darwinist Smear

President Obama throws another rhetorical temper tantrum.

Social Darwinism isn’t what it used to be.

President Barack Obama lambasted the Paul Ryan budget as “thinly veiled social Darwinism” in a scorching budget speech last week. The charge displayed the same care as his contention that it would be unprecedented for the Supreme Court to overturn legislation passed by Congress — in other words, another verbal temper tantrum substituting petulance for reason.

Social Darwinism is the 19th-century creed that, drawing on biology, supposedly held that a laissez-faire economy should operate on the basis of “survival of the fittest.” The strong rise, while the weak fall, unaided and deserving their pitiable fate.

What are the telltale signs of social Darwinism in the Ryan budget? Total federal spending will only increase from $3.6 trillion this year to $4.8 trillion in ten years. If you can’t already hear the cries of children relegated to the poorhouse and of old people pushed out onto ice floes, you must be a 21st-century robber baron. Ryan wants to spend 19.8 percent of GDP as of 2022, a greater share of the economy than when President Bill Clinton left office — that infamous advocate of private-sector predation at the expense of the worthless poor.

Doesn’t Ryan want to cut taxes for the rich? He would reduce tax rates, while making the revenue up by closing loopholes and deductions. This Darwinistic notion was endorsed by President Obama’s own fiscal commission, chaired by men the president fulsomely praised without ever once mentioning that they were a danger to the weak and the vulnerable on account of their unhinged belief in a society run by and for the evolutionarily superior.

But Ryan wants to end Medicare, doesn’t he? Ten years from now, Ryan proposes introducing an element of choice into Medicare while limiting the program’s growth to the GDP growth rate plus 0.5 percent, the same spending goal that the president sets out in his own budget. If Ryan is “red in tooth and claw” on Medicare, so is the president. The difference is that President Obama prefers a price-setting bureaucratic panel to competition as his Darwinistic tool to weed out the maladapted elderly.

Read it all here: http://www.nationalreview.com/articl...ear-rich-lowry

Social Darwinism? Hadn't heard that one from Hava-gafa-kasha.....