In reading through the transcripts of President Obama’s recent speech to the NAACP Centennial Convention, I was mostly impressed. He eloquently summarized the struggles of blacks to overcome what was undoubtedly cruel and discriminatory treatment of the past. He recalled the days of Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and segregation and how the founding of the NAACP was a beginning of change that carried through to Dr. King, “Freedom Rides; taking seats at Greensboro lunch counters; and registering voters in rural Mississippi.”
“Because of what they did, we are a more perfect union. Because Jim Crow laws were overturned, black CEOs today run Fortune 500 companies. Because civil rights laws were passed, black mayors, governors, and Members of Congress serve in places where they might once have been unable to vote. And because ordinary people made the civil rights movement their own, I made a trip to Springfield a couple years ago - where Lincoln once lived, and race riots once raged - and began the journey that has led me here tonight as the 44th President of the United States of America.”
President Obama also acknowledged “the remarkable achievements of the past one hundred years,” and the “extraordinary progress that cannot be denied.” He also exhorted the African American community to do their part:
“But all these innovative programs and expanded opportunities will not, in and of themselves, make a difference if each of us, as parents and as community leaders, fail to do our part by encouraging excellence in our children. Government programs alone won't get our children to the Promised Land. We need a new mindset, a new set of attitudes - because one of the most durable and destructive legacies of discrimination is the way that we have internalized a sense of limitation; how so many in our community have come to expect so little of ourselves.”
All in all a good and inspiring speech. But, what also jumped out at me from the mid section of this oratory, as he listed the current struggles of the African American community, including lower educational achievements, higher incarceration and unemployment rates, was this troubling sentence:
“But our task of reducing these structural inequalities has been made more difficult by the state, and structure, of the broader economy; an economy fueled by a cycle of boom and bust; an economy built not on a rock, but sand.”
To me, this is a direct indictment against the free-market economy that has built the United States to the most powerful engine of opportunity the world has ever known. President Obama sees this as an economy “built on sand” because of what he sees as its “cycle of boom and bust.”
So, we ask ourselves, what is the alternative? Rather than an economy built on the innovation spurred by competition in a market where people are free to create whole new segments of the economy that never existed before…or equally, fail due to lack of innovation, or productivity…what would take us off these shifting sands and onto bedrock in President Obama’s mind? Well, I think he believes that the solution is a Planned or Centralized Economy where all aspects of the economy are controlled by a central government. This reasoning permeates his rhetoric and agenda from the bail-out and control of the banks and automobile industry, to the “public option” for health care to the cure for the plight of African Americans. Barack Obama believes that the good people in the government bureaucracy can do a better job at managing the economy than the people running companies.
Liberals, Progressives, Socialists, Fascists always arrogantly believe that though it may never have succeeded before, they can make a centralized economy work. They never look at the root cause of past failures, they just believe that success was elusive because enough wasn’t done or the right people weren’t in charge…and they, of course, are the right people. It didn’t work for the Soviet Union, once heralded by American Progressives as the model for the economy of the future…It hasn’t worked for China, who has had to incrementally move toward more free-market and democratic reforms over the years. And, it has never worked in the United States.
Every time the U.S. government seeks to control markets or the economy, it has detrimental affects. It is strongly believed by some economists today that the government’s response to a recession actually moved the country into The Depression and lengthened the downturn. Jimmy Carter’s policies lead to high interest rates, hyper-inflation and rampant unemployment. Today’s banking crisis is a direct effect of Democratic meddling in the financial industry, coercing, intimidating, and downright threatening banks to change their lending practices and make loans to those who were previously considered bad risks.
Centralized bureaucracies have never and can never succeed in directing a healthy economy because their decisions are based on political issues that consolidate and expand their power rather on the cold hard facts of supply, demand, productivity, risk and reward that corporations in a free-market economy must balance. If a central planning initiative is not working, they simply throw more control, more bureaucracy at the problem. In some ways, corporations seek the same thing, to consolidate and expand their position in the market…but this is done through providing better, cheaper, faster products. Bureaucracy’s product is control, manipulation and patronage.
So, back to the troubles of today’s African American community. Does President Obama truly believe that he is the one who can solve these problems with more government after more than 45 years of Great Society policies and expenditures have apparently not worked? In fact, it is many of these policies that have failed the African American community. Large inner-city communities like Detroit, and Washington D.C. to name two, who suffer the worst of all from the problems have been controlled by Democrats for decades and the violence and frequency of crime have steadily increased. Welfare pays people not to work and incentivizes them to have babies outside of wedlock. Affirmative Action tells people that they don’t have to be as smart or as good as the other guy…they just have to show up. These and more are all products of past Progressive government.
As Mr. Obama just offers us more of the same, does he arrogantly believe that he is better able to implement these policies than his predecessors? Or, does he know it won’t work as advertised…and the end game is not making the economy work for everyone, but gaining and keeping control. Either way is very frightening.
