The View From 1776

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Obama has spent more time (and taxpayers’ money) traveling about the country making campaign-style, fund-raising speeches during his four-plus years in office than any other president in history.

Only on a few occasions has he deigned to invite senior Republican legislators to meetings at the White House.  When Republicans expressed objections to some of the president’s policies, he curtly dismissed their concerns by declaring, “I won.”

When his recent speechifying tour failed to arouse public opinion in support of his proposed expansion of gun control, the president bitterly chastised Democrat/Socialists and Republicans alike in a press conference speech.

Thomas Jefferson, who famously observed that the best government is the one that governs the least (in contrast to liberal-progressive collectivism), approached matters very differently.

Jon Meacham, in his Pulitzer Prize wining biography, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, wrote:

“From his time spent in the Confederation Congress and presiding over the Senate for four years as vice president, Jefferson appreciated how to handle lawmakers…a president’s attentions meant the world to politicians and to ordinary people alike.  For all his low-key republican symbolism, Jefferson understood that access to the president himself could make all the difference in statecraft - hence his dinners with lawmakers and his willingness to receive callers…

“The president had to be able to trust lawmakers with insights and opinions that he might not offer to a broader audience, creating a sense of intimacy and common purpose.  Making speeches at other politicians - or appearing to be only making speeches at them - was not the best way to enlist their allegiance or their aid, nor to govern well.”

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Needless to say, once established, the power to limit personal savings will eventually be extended to all economic levels of society.

Forbes Magazine staff writer Robert Lenzner opines on the president’s latest socialistic attack.

Obama Goes Against the Grain of What America Represents

Liberal-progressive-socialist orthodoxy, articulated in Keynesian macroeconomics, preaches that recessions are caused by people who save too much.  According to Lord Keynes, it is the duty of citizens to spend all of their income.  If people fail to spend on consumer goods, it is the prerogative of government to fill the theoretical void with deficit spending and by increasing taxes. 

Following the Keynesian prescription, Federal deficit spending is financed with fiat money created out of thin air by the Federal Reserve.  As a powerful disincentive to saving, the Fed has reduced interest rates to levels below the rate of inflation.

From its earliest days socialism has promoted methods of taking from the wealthy and giving to the poor.  Henri de Saint-Simon, the first systematic articulator of socialism, believed that government should confiscate all, or a major portion, of a person’s wealth at his death.  Within a few decades, as Saint-Simon envisioned it, all wealth would have come under government ownership.  Government then would be able to redistribute wealth among its citizens as it saw fit, and no one would be able to resist, because everyone’s livelihood would depend directly upon the whim of the governing elite.

Judeo-Christian morality always has admonished individuals to deal fairly with the poor and to help those in need.  But only with socialism has the individual been pushed out of the way by government, which becomes the domineering and all powerful agent for redistributing wealth.  In practice, redistribution of income and wealth is a process of rewarding liberal-progressive allies and punishing the opposition.

Judeo-Christian doctrine does not counsel taking from the rich; it aims by moral suasion to induce all individuals, led by their churches and synagogues, to do the right thing and to help the poor and unfortunate.

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The socialist welfare state instituted by Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s New Deal aimed society in that direction.  Liberal-progressives today are striving to complete the destruction. 

The issue of states’ rights vs Federal power was the nub of the whole debate between 1787 and 1789 about ratifying the Constitution.  Did it grant too much power to a potentially tyrannical Federal government?  In the Federalist collection of newspaper essays written to support ratification of the Constitution during that debate, James Madison was at pains to confirm that, in matters affecting everyday domestic policy, the states and local governments would exercise a greater bulk of the governmental power than the Federal government.  Only during times of war or other national emergency, he said, would the powers of the Federal government assume significant and broad regulatory proportions.

Since the 1930s, however, continual encroachments by the Federal government have upended the original ethos of the Constitution.

According to an Investor’s Business Daily (IBD) editorial (It Takes A Village Idiot To Say Kids Belong To State), Melissa Harris-Perry, an African-American professor at Tulane and an MSNBC contributor, has endorsed the concept that children belong to the political state, not to their parents.  Harris-Perry’s endorsement may not represent the majority view among liberal-progressives, but the ineluctable trajectory of liberal-progressivism is in that direction.

Children as property of the political state is a conceptual building block for imposing the idea that all of us are wards of the socialist welfare system, that we must look to the government for our daily bread and must, therefore, become become obedient servants of our elite rulers.  High taxes, control of the economy and the monetary system, endless regulation of every aspect of private life, and education as a socialist, materialist indoctrination system are the political state’s main tools.

Cass Sunstein, who was Obama’s Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, proposed to abolish traditional marriage as a state-sponsored institution.

Proceeding along that tangent, same-sex marriage has become a wedge to destroy the religious and political institutions of marriage and family.

Each new day brings to light additions to the torrent of liberal-progressive-socialist attacks upon the basic social and political institutions of Western civilization and its foundation in Judeo-Christian morality.  Reducing marriage to no more than issuance of a civil certificate acknowledging the partnering of any two people is exactly what the Soviet Union did.  The aim was, and is under Obama’s New New Deal socialism, to break down lingering vestiges of individual moral responsibility and to supplant them with servility under the supposedly classless socialist political state.

Sunstein’s proposal to degrade marriage to a civil license to any two people desiring to become partners is in direct opposition to a principal reason for the state’s sanctioning marriage. 

In a larger context, no political state can endure without stable families, which both produce the children necessary to perpetuate the body politic, and serve as the primary educational institution for all citizens.  It was in the home that children traditionally learned the principles of fair play, courtesy and respect for their elders and playmates, and the traditions and customs that foster patriotism and make each political society a distinct and enduring body.

Historically the state was concerned primarily with the welfare of children born from a marriage.  Fathers, as well as mothers, were to have responsibility for the welfare and acculturation of their children.  The plague of illegitimate births and single-parent families is only a foretaste of what is to come if marriage is abolished as a state-sanctioned institution that gives legal rights to children and parents.  The dissolution of marriage is inseparably connected to rampant drug abuse and violent crime to which single-parent children all too frequently fall victim.

Ancient Sparta, at the time of the Peloponnesian War with the Athenian city state, had for centuries a rigid communal political system that required families to surrender their children at an early age to the state for military training.  This was because the Spartan ruling class lived under constant threat of armed rebellion of their helots, who were subordinated in a state of semi-slavery.  Children with physical or mental deficiencies were killed by the political state.  Presumably that practice would find favor among people who today advocate unlimited abortion, though liberal-progressives profess to abhor military action to protect fundamental interests of the political state. 

As the IBD editorial reminds us, Adolph Hitler’s creation of the Hitler Youth organization was based on the same idea: the political state should exercise the power to brain-wash children to believe the state’s social and political propaganda and to place their primary loyal in the political state, rather than in their families.

V. I. Lenin in a speech to the Commissars of Education in Moscow, 1923, expressed the same policy:  “We must hate — hatred is the basis of Communism.  Children must be taught to hate their parents if they are not Communists.” 

For what other reason would liberal-progressives entertain the idea that children are the property of the political state? 

Today’s liberal-progressive education system attempts to displace the family as the source of fundamental moral and spiritual values and, instead, teach our children that capitalistic individualism and Judeo-Christian morality are crimes against humanity.

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Read How the Democrats Destroyed Detroit

The Obama paradigm, absorbed in his school years, is that of socialist Europe.  Free-market capitalism, along with spiritual religion (especially Judeo-Christian morality), are viewed as oppressive forces to keep a plutocratic minority in power.  Social justice demands that the political state confiscate plutocratic wealth and redistribute it to “the people.”

One need not work for a living; the political state, in Obama’s view the author and creator of everything in economic and political society, will provide whatever state planners deem appropriate.  The road to this socialist nirvana must be opened by making everyone a ward of the political state.  Hence ObamaCare and the tens of thousands of new regulations calculated to strangle private businesses.

Some liberal-progressives already are calling for abandonment of the Constitution and replacing it with public opinion polls to expand the powers of government to control individuals’ lives.

This is not a new paradigm.  It was called for by Karl Marx in the mid-1800s.  Germany’s Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, established the world’s first welfare state apparatus shortly thereafter.  As I wrote in The Liberal Jihad - The Hundred-Year War Against the Constitution:

The power potential of socialist collectivism was apparent to Bismarck. In 1881 he instituted the world’s first welfare state. Bismarck played ball with socialist party factions in the Reichstag, not from any sympathy with the cause of egalitarianism. He was, after all, a Prussian Junker, a member of the hereditary landed aristocracy. He supported socialism only because it promoted collectivizing national power and militated against English-style constitutional individualism, which he detested.

The welfare state, he decided, was the ultimate method for authoritarian control of the people. Bismarck candidly told the Reichstag that he was instituting the welfare state as a means to make people dependent upon the government and more easily herded like cattle. People who faced the potential loss of their government pensions and other welfare benefits would not be likely to balk at the orders of Bismarck and the Prussian Kaiser. History, shortly thereafter, was to validate his judgment, when obedient Germans twice marched into world wars for their collectivized, socialized Fatherland.

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