Archive for December, 2008
By Thomas E. Brewton
Believing apparently that specifics are not necessary, Senator Obama promises us that his election will bring us all together in one happy family via a miraculous transformation of society and its citizens.
Earthly perfection of human nature and human society, here and now, is what Senator Obama is promising us. This is his implicit message when tells us that he can, as President, bring us all together and move us beyond strife, aggression, and wars.
One thing we can state categorically in that regard is that what Senator Obama promises is emphatically, irreconcilably opposed to the Judeo-Christian foundations of Western Civilization. Parenthetically, the Senator's secular and socialistic mind-set may explain in part why he saw no problem with the unchristian hatred preached by his minister, the Rev. Wright.
Senator Obama is not necessarily painting himself as the Second Messiah who will personally effect the transformation. Rather, as a good socialist-progressive-liberal, he expects that structural changes in the political state will do the necessary work.
Such structural changes will include higher taxes, especially on capital gains which fuel business innovation and more efficient production, massive increases in Federal welfare-state spending programs, and crushing inflation, along with extensive increases in regulation of personal and business conduct (including stronger affirmative-action measures).
As the German Empire's Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck told the Reichstag in the 1880s, he was instituting the world's first welfare state in order to gain total control over the German people. Those who are dependent upon the political state for their benefits, he observed, can be herded like cattle.
In contrast, in the Old Testament, King Solomon tells us:
The words of the Teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem:
"Meaningless! Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless." What does man gain from all his labor at which he toils under the sun? (Ecclesiastes 1:1-3)
I, the Teacher, was king over Israel in Jerusalem. I devoted myself to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under heaven. What a heavy burden God has laid on men! I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind. (Ecclesiastes 1:12-14)
By Thomas E. Brewton
As prolongation of the 1930s Depression and stagflation in the 1970s demonstrated, Senator Obama’s announced policies are a prescription for economic disaster.
Keynesian economic doctrine, not under that name, but in substance, is back in the news in a truly menacing way. Senator Obama proposes to repeat the policies of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal that turned an ordinary two-year recession into an eight-year disaster, with unemployment rates continuously in the high teens.
The key elements of Senator Obama’s proposed economic policies, as in the New Deal and the stagflation of the 1970s, are much higher taxes, along with a pervasive increase of business regulations and price controls in healthcare and energy (which sharply depress business activity and employment rates), full-frontal embrace of labor unions (which will push up wages and benefits to levels deterring profitable expansion of industrial production), and massive new government deficit spending (which will accelerate the already dangerously high rate of inflation and devaluation of the dollar). Carried out as he proposes, Senator Obama’s polices will lead us again into the swamp of stagflation.
The basic thrust of Keynesianism is the belief that control of the economy must be collectivized at the Federal level, because private business is incapable of providing full employment, and because the proper goal of economic policy must be thwarting greedy businessmen to attain so-called social justice: equal distribution of income and wealth, without regard to merit, capability, or hard work.
Not surprisingly the New York Times editorial board and the Times’s propagandist Paul Krugman are prominent Keynesian enthusiasts.