How does free enterprise fit into President Obama's vision for America?
Picking Osawatomie, Kansas as the site for an address is the kind of over-the-top symbolism that would make even Aaron Sorkin blush.
In 1910, Theodore Roosevelt, then a year and a half out of the White House, used the small town as the location to announce a detailed plan for the philosophy he called “New Nationalism,” an expansive progressive agenda, one he hoped would form the basis of the platform of his own Republican Party.
By contrast, President Obama’s speech this afternoon in Osawatomie was glaringly lacking in specifics. Instead, it was a motley assortment of bumper sticker meditations on the importance of education and the scourge of income inequality, and appeals to increase “fairness” in the tax system (as if anyone claims to want an “unfair” tax system).
In short, it was a typical political stump speech favored by politicians of both parties: long on rhetoric and short on policy, based around a potted Whiggish version of American history.
This is no surprise — the president is, after all, a politician, and he’s asking the American people for a second term as president. But it does represent a missed opportunity for him to articulate a clear vision for his beliefs about free enterprise, markets, and competition.
Obama gave the requisite nod to free markets, calling them “the greatest force of economic progress in human history.” But he gives no sense of how he sees free markets and free enterprise — as they actually exist, not in dystopian fiction or Michael Moore movies — as interacting with any other part of his vision for the United States.
The role of free enterprise in American culture is a defining issue of the day. None of the major policy questions that dominate the public discussion — tax rates, the deficit, broadband, roads — can be understood without a clear vision of the proper relationship between the government and the private sector. And this requires a theory of free enterprise. If the president is going to campaign on a sharply populist platform, he needs to articulate how free enterprise and free markets fit in with his vision of America and economic growth and prosperity.
That gets you to the first big break: http://dailycaller.com/2011/12/06/ho...n-for-america/
Here's a gem from the second page.
"Should American free enterprise be a staid, shallow system where there’s little risk and little reward, one that’s managed, clean, and rationally administered, one that plods along reliably? In other words, should it be free enterprise in name but democratic socialism in practice?
Or does the president view free enterprise as a robust and moral system in which people have the freedom to try new ideas, work hard, and profit if they succeed, a system in which competition gives people the opportunity to earn their own success, in which individual opportunity flourishes? Does he view free enterprise as a system that enables people to build their own lives, or one that inevitably results in corrupt crony capitalism? Can free enterprise foster hard work and playing by the rules — the values that permeated the president’s remarks — or is it inimical to those values?"
The Presidents vision is quite clear - it is the former. He wants government to be the social equalizer as he believes we all need to be the exact same, of course, except him.
The greatest hypocracy of all is that most liberals will not say they want socialism. They will veil it anyway they can because they know implicitly that this is America - the place where people come to be free.
Obama’s all out war on free enterprice
The Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky and James Sherk have a must-read post at The Corner about an internal NLRB memorandum detailing plans to give unions much greater power over employers:
Specifically, the NLRB wants to force companies to provide detailed economic justifications (including underlying cost or benefit considerations) for relocation decisions to allow unions to bargain over them — or lose the right to make those decisions without bargaining over them. It is a “heads I win, tails you lose” situation for unions.
…
The NRLB’s goal is not just to prevent companies from investing in right-to-work states. The board apparently also wants to force employers to make unions “an equal partner in the running of the business enterprise.” … the board wants business decisions made to benefit unions, not the shareholders, owners, and other employees of a business, or the overall economy. The Boeing charges are evidently just a first step toward that goal.
This memo, and the Boeing charges, are not the first evidence that the Obama administration is using every lever of federal agency power to attack free enterprise to the benefit of organized labor. Former Department of Labor appointee Don Todd told The Daily Caller‘s Matthew Boyle this January:
In a worst-case scenario, your union organizer comes to you, offers you a deal to unionize, you say, ‘no,’ and, the next thing you know, OSHA’s [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] at your door. Then, Wage and Hour show up, and they want to publicize it. They always find something wrong.
Read the rest here: http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/...ree-enterprice
The evidence keeps mounting. Obama wants the Federal Government calling the shots for John Q. Public. That's all too apparent. It only goes in one direction; been that way for years.
So I say to liberals, admit it, embrace it. Don't hide behind names like "liberal" or "progressive"; simply call yourself a "proud" socialist. The truth will set you free.
