Barack Obama…Free-Market Champion? by John Allen
Of all of President Obama’s lies (and there are many), one of the most infuriating is his insistence that he is a strong believer in the free-market. I’m sure Obama’s teleprompter told him that the term “free-market” polls well so he should try to use it whenever he can to hide his true intentions. He has made this claim on many occasions:
- Last fall he said, “Look, I am a pro-growth, free-market guy. I love the market.”
- Just a few weeks ago at the business roundtable Obama said, ““As I said before, I am a strong believer in the ability of the free-market to generate wealth and prosperity that’s shared across the board.” (we’ll come back to this quote in a minute)
- Last week at the G-20 conference he said, “I strongly believe in a free-market system.”
There are many other instances where he has said similar things. It is clear that he has no real idea what this whole “free-market” thing is all about. He gives it lip service to provide himself a little cover as he institutes policies that increase government’s role in the economy. It would be nice if our President, the strong believer in free-markets, had ever read anything by Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Thomas Sowell or Walter Williams (I’d even settle for a John Stossel article). If he had he would realize that a free-market is a required pre-condition for a free society and that it has served us well for over 230 years. Obama treats the economy as a plaything to be controlled and manipulated in order to achieve his social utopian fantasies.
As Charles Krauthammer put it, “Obama is a leveler. He has come to narrow the divide between rich and poor. For him the ultimate social value is fairness. Imposing it upon the American social order is his mission.”
Well, when imposing “fairness” is your main goal the free-market cannot be your instrument of choice. Fairness has no meaning in relation to a free-market. It really depends on your definition of “fairness”. If “fairness” means equal distribution of money then the free-market will always be unfair because talent, drive, creativity, work ethic, etc are not evenly distributed among us. Of course, many of us would consider that “unfairness” to be fair because those people who are most productive are more highly rewarded. I mean, we are talking about a warped definition of fairness. The “fair” thing about the free-market is that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed. The fairness is in the opportunity, not the results.
And notice this quote from his speech at the Business Roundtable a few weeks ago, “As I said before, I am a strong believer in the ability of the free market to generate wealth and prosperity that’s shared across the board.” Shared across the board? Whose definition of the free-market is that? Sharing wealth and prosperity across the board is not the role of the free-market, it is the role of government social engineers.
But, OK, if Obama insists on calling himself a free-market guy then I have one question for him. Name one policy (just one) that you have instituted or proposed that diminishes government’s role in the economy. Of course, there isn’t one. Think about that. Every policy that this “free-market guy” has proposed has served to increase government’s power in the economy and, therefore, over the decision-making ability of every citizen.
Here are just some of Obama’s “free-market” policies:
-Provide government funded pre-school for all children.
-Opposing school vouchers, thereby maintaining government’s monopoly in education.
-Government subsidized health insurance as a means to crush private health insurance companies and put everyone on the government program. In effect, socialized medicine.
-Pushing for more regulations in the financial industry.
-Accepting of more global regulations of the financial industry.
-Firing CEO of private company, handpicking board members and dictating what products they will produce.
-Capping executive pay for CEO’s of private companies that took TARP money.
-Pushing to obtain authority to seize “failing” companies, even ones that never took TARP money.
-Massive government spending, which drains money from the private sector and crowds out private investment.
-Huge increase in energy costs resulting from Cap and Trade system (the funds from which he wants to use to subsidize the government run health insurance program).
-Raising taxes on personal income for the “rich”, capital gains for everybody, and corporations that operate overseas.
I’m sure this list could be a lot longer if I thought about it for longer than 5 minutes. Look, some people believe that government should play a bigger role in the economy. Some people are offended that there is “unfairness” in America. Some people believe that government is more wise, more benevolent and more efficient than private enterprises looking after their own self-interests. It’s just that we usually refer to these people as “socialists” and not “strong believers in the free-market”.
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