Obama, Rand, And Incompetence

As time goes on, more people are starting to see their initial impression of Barack Obama was correct: He doesn't have the experience needed to sit in the Oval Office. Or as some have put it, he and his team are incompetent.

Goodness knows Obama is having a difficult time filling the open slots on his cabinet. Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH) took a closer look at what the President wanted in a Commerce Secretary and decided to tell him “Thanks, but no thanks.” He didn't want to be nothing but a mouthpiece for the administration, in charge of a major government department that was going to get more and more of it's functions subsumed by the White House.

Gregg is merely one of many that have said “no thanks”, or were disqualified due to legal problems, or decided they wanted nothing to do with an administration that appeared to be doing its darnedest to destroy the US economy and replace it with a system everyone knows doesn't work.

It's like a nightmare right out of Atlas Shrugged, as Obama and the other members of the triumvirate, Pelosi and Reid, are working very hard to use the present economic “crisis” to redistribute wealth they haven't earned and give it to those too lazy, incompetent, stupid, or too envious to make their own wealth.

Politicians invariably respond to crises -- that in most cases they themselves created -- by spawning new government programs, laws and regulations. These, in turn, generate more havoc and poverty, which inspires the politicians to create more programs . . . and the downward spiral repeats itself until the productive sectors of the economy collapse under the collective weight of taxes and other burdens imposed in the name of fairness, equality and do-goodism.

As much as Obama keeps laying the blame for the present economy squarely on the shoulders of his predecessor, he's got to point the finger at Pelosi and Reid and their fellow Democrats in Congress as well as they helped engineer the very economic crisis we're now facing.

It makes one wonder about Obama's competence when he'll create a greater deficit in one year than George W. Bush did in eight years in office, explaining it away as needed spending to help the economy recover. But all it really is is theft on a scale so huge that it boggles the mind, taking money from those actually making it and then pissing it away on things this country really doesn't need or want. We already know he's pretty good at spending other people's money, in this case the Annenberg Foundation's money, and having nothing to show for it. Will it be any different with over $3.5 trillion of taxpayer money? I doubt it.

Goodness knows he's made known his dislike of the wealthy, he being a good little socialist, but he also shows his ignorance of who it is that creates all the jobs in this country. (Hint: it ain't the government.) He also chooses to ignore that most of the wealthy got that way by working hard, taking chances, and doing their jobs better than their competitors. That lack of understanding is a danger signal to the rest of us that he's only getting started at dismantling an economic system that is, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, the worst economic system in existence, except for all the others.

Imagine his surprise when he finds that more Americans are waking up to the fact that he plans to greatly reduce their standards of living “for their own good” and are letting know their displeasure.

The world seems to be emerging from a moral and intellectual coma, perhaps temporarily, perhaps permanently. It is discovering that other ideas have other consequences, as well, ideas that promote life, promote prosperity, promote ambition and personal success, and that they are possible only in political freedom, and that this freedom has been violated, abridged, and nullified by the first set of ideas. True, politics is the last thing to be affected by a philosophical revolution. But one cannot help but be pleased with how startled the collectivists and altruists are now by the knowledge that they have not successfully pulled a fast one on Americans. These Americans have come knocking on the doors of elitists or leaning over the café railings or invading their legislated smoke-free bars and restaurants to ask: What in hell do you think you are doing?

The Americans who recently protested the spendthrift policies of the Obama administration and Congress with “tea parties,” and who plan to protest them on an even larger scale in the near future, one can wager are not regular readers of The New York Times. They cannot have much in common with its columnists and editors, nor with the news media.

So the collectivist and altruist elite become very touchy when the people for whom they are “doing good” for their own sake, even to the point of enacting coercive and felonious legislation, exhibit signs of intelligence, resistance and anger. How dare these yokels!

And nothing raises their hackles higher than any mention of Ayn Rand.

Could it be because Rand rightfully labeled these parasites for what they are? Looters.

They produce nothing tangible yet feel they are entitled to take money you, me, and every other American has earned because they know how to spend it far more wisely than we do. Again, it's “for our own good.” They loot the treasury and expect us to fill it up again so they can steal even more. And in the process they propose laws and regulations making it even more difficult for us to create own wealth, and once created, to keep it. They'll justify it by trying the tell us the wealthy got that way by stealing money from the poor. (Why steal it from the poor? They haven't got any money to steal. See how this line of reasoning falls apart once simple logic is applied?) They treat wealth as a zero sum game: someone got rich because they made someone else poor. But it hasn't worked that way for centuries.

Maybe someone should send the Incompetent-In-Chief a memo about that.