Reno Hayek Symposium

On paper Obama appears to be a smart guy and reasonably well informed. I suspect he knows:

• We face $1.4 Trillion annual deficits for the next decade.
• Our current national debt is $12.3 Trillion and will grow by $1 Trillion a year.
• Estimated unfunded liabilities from social security and medicare are $107 Trillion.
• States with aggregate deficits of $350 Billion, debt of $1.9 Trillion, and unfunded liabilities of $1.4 Trillion are asking for federal handouts.
• Unemployment is 9+% with private sector growth stalled.

Why then would he promote a radical takeover of healthcare with 10 year costs of $2.3 Trillion that adds $1.86 Trillion to the deficit over the next 20 years, that creates employment taxes and mandates, each discouraging private sector employment, and that fails to solve the demographically certain failure of medicare, social security and medicaid? We’ve proven our inability to handle two, no three if you include medicaid, major entitlements, why add another? And why would he risk his party’s control of Congress and his own ability to govern to attain this goal that a majority of Americans don’t want?

Obama is smart enough to know that Obamacare will exacerbate the financial straights of the United States. It’s uncertainty will decrease private sector employment. It’s taxes will decrease private capital for investment. It will cede financial and technological leadership to other countries. In short, we will be worse off tomorrow than we are today.  Why would he risk that…want that?

It is clear that he knowingly intends to drive us further to the brink. It is also clear that given his apparent intelligence he has an end-game in mind. Take our admitted crisis, you know the “never-let-a-crisis-go-to-waste” kind, explode it into a gigantic, off-the-clff catastrophe, then come up with a one-of-a-kind, popular solution that involves “shared pain” and if we are all lucky, someday “shared gain.”  Call it a Cloward-Piven Strategy on steroids. (See: Cloward-Piven Strategy: Is It Obama’s? and references cited therein.)

As Larry Kudlow said in NRO, One Giant Government Leap Backwards,” One of the most galling features of this plan is a taxpayer-subsidized government-insurance entitlement for people earning up to 400 percent above the poverty line, or nearly $100,000 for a family of four. In other words, a middle-class health-care entitlement that will add millions of people to the federal dole. It’s all too reminiscent of the political dictum of the old New Dealer Harry Hopkins: tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect.”

So will Obama’s “Fiscal Responsibility and Reform Commission” turn out to be the VAT Commission with a European 12% sales tax on top of the income tax, excise tax, etc. And those on top of the various state sales, income and property taxes? All this to finance BIG GOVERNMENT? If so, we will then all have the advantage of being “in the same boat,” “equal,” and “happy” in an ever declining country and economy.

So for the literarily inclined, Obama wants us on Hayek’s Road to Serfdom where we will encounter Orwell’s Animal Farm with 1984’s Big Brother in control. As Obama recently said in response to a push-back, “we won the election.”  And win the next election and the next, he aims to do with the creation of more and more dependency on him and less and less individual responsibility.

I won’t be around to witness the outcome but I hope the next generation will become informed and engaged, lest our grandchildren and great-grandchildren suffer horrible consequences.

Tom Motherway