Third of three, shortly to be rolled into a single post, after, you know, editing (which will generate a fourth, but that’s another story).
Get In The Game
This speech revolves around paragraphs 50 and 51, to the extent that the rest of it begins to seem like mere padding, especially since there are only 60 paragraphs in the whole speech. It’s as if he needed several pages of warm-up time, working up the nerve, to drop his proposition. Can’t say I blame him.
Because he blames American corporations for the economy not responding to his stimuli, of course the solution must lie in changing the behavior of American corporations. Paragraph 50:
[pullquote]American companies have nearly $2 trillion sitting on their balance sheets[/pullquote]
So if I’ve got one message, my message is now is the time to invest in America. Now is the time to invest in America. (Applause.) Today, American companies have nearly $2 trillion sitting on their balance sheets. And I know that many of you have told me that you’re waiting for demand to rise before you get off the sidelines and expand, and that with millions of Americans out of work, demand has risen more slowly than any of us would like.
Up until the applause things were going well; then he slips in the part about “investment” not having anything to do with foreign capital, but with American companies shelling out cash to, uh, buy themselves? Oh, right, simply shovel all the cash into a Union’s bank account, and it will all be better! Gotcha.
[pullquote]So I just want to encourage you to get in the game.[/pullquote]
We’re in this together, but many of your own economists and salespeople are now forecasting a healthy increase in demand. So I just want to encourage you to get in the game. As part of the bipartisan tax deal we negotiated, with the support of the Chamber, businesses can immediately expense 100 percent of their capital investments. And as all of you know, it’s investments made now that will pay off as the economy rebounds. And as you hire, you know that more Americans working will mean more sales for your companies. It will mean more demand for your products and services. It will mean higher profits for your companies. We can create a virtuous circle.
First off, we would have to assume that there is no “virtuous circle” in our American way of business, or in the American economy. It is obvious that at any rate, to the President’s point of view, we do not have a virtuous circle, we need one, and government must change the behavior of American business if we are to have it. This is not the way capitalists see it, and this is not the way that the leader of a Republic speaks to the populace.
To the man who has only a hammer, every problem is a nail. Barack Obama is a man with no experience in leading in any executive capacity (save for the last two disastrous years), and no experience in any financial endeavor which is not completely dependent upon the government’s coffers. He is educated and motivated to understand every conflict not as a clash of values, but as a misunderstanding of sorts. His only tool is dialogue, in the mistaken apprehension that even if both sides had an unclear vision, both of them would be willing to either admit mistake or adjust demands. An easy example is Iran, and another is Russia. Nothing has changed this president’s rhetoric that dialogue, engagement, negotiations and so forth are what is needed. We should “extend our hand” to Tehran, and “push reset” on our relationship with Moscow. As if the problem were one of communication, or even of honest disagreement.
Iran and the United States have been communicating very clearly for thirty years, and the only people who are unclear about that fact are the ones like Obama who do not speak the language of power. Unfortunately, they communicate with just as much clarity in the language of weakness, of foolishness, of provocation. This president says things which are not true in the hopes of making them true.
And so it is that when he speaks to the Chamber of Commerce, he invents stories about how the American industrial Crusade flattened the Axis powers,
The President is asking the largest, most powerful companies to hire employess solely for the sake of hiring employees. In these two paragraphs, he as much as admits the failure of his administration’s big-spending “stimulus” programs which have accomplished no such thing. Right here, he attempts to export a Keynesian government “jobs” spending stimulus program out to the private sector. He implies that it is a moral imperative, so soon after remarking that R&D accomplished here which leads to new products being built overseas “breaks the social compact”.
This is presumably Rousseau’s “social compact”, which Rousseau stated briefly as “Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.” As you might imagine, this phrase is much relied-upon by Marx himself and those who follow him, and not favored in other systems.
I’ll take a moment on moral and economic philosophy.
Mercantilism, boiled down, requires a powerful central government to ensure that the people, resources, estate and capital of a nation (and its colonies) be focused on production, sales, and export of finished goods to the desired detriment of importation, even at the expense of domestic availability and comfort. Production is good, consumption is bad. This comports handily with the President’s statement that (paragraph 10)
“We need an economy that’s based not on what we consume and borrow from other nations, but what we make and what we sell around the world.”
So the President Mercantilist in thought? No, but critically, he thinks that the Chamber is.
The President is a Marxist, which is one of the historic responses to Mercantilism. The other is Capitalism
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