This is actually my second post on this topic, but this is the incident which made his chosen trajectory clear to me. President Obama’s speech of February seventh to the United States Chamber of Commerce was stunning not only for its fall-flat lack of any accomplishment, but more notably for the bald-faced affirmation of Marxist principles.
The speech is a watershed moment in this Presidency, and I feel will be studied from a bit more historical a perspective, given the passage of some time. I won’t spend overlong on details, as the speech can be seen on YouTube (here, here) and certainly is available from the White House. The speech is a half-hour of mostly repetitive formulations of three things: a flawed analysis of what the problem is and what is causing it; an attempt to fix the wrong things by repeating the steps that actually got us here, and a filthy little quid pro quo wherein if the plutocrats will only dance to his tune, he will use the power of government to grease their skids. I gave up breaking the speech into sections in anything other than a chronological fashion, as the analysis, proposal, and proposition are strewn forward and back through most of the paragraphs in the speech.
The take-aways are that he believes the current economic disaster can be laid at the feet of George W. Bush, that the failure of the economy to respond to Obama’s remedies can be laid at the feet of greedy businessmen in the Chamber of Commerce, that the solution is for those greedy moneybags to hire people whether they need employees now or not, and to pay them not only a paycheck, but dividends, or something–his own ignorance leaves me guessing at how his “share the profits” is to be accomplished regarding those who are not shareholders. This is all phrased in borrowings from FDR and JFK (from whom he borrows rather rudely), and from many of the thinkers of those times (America was very nearly a Socialist-friendly country in the interwar years, and the leftist’s chosen method of agitation in America was to create “the moral equivalent of war”, which we see quite crudely stated in this speech). Finally, he repeatedly flirts and teases with what he will do as far as reducing regulation, sweetening the pot for R&D budgets, etc, if only these robber barons will pour some of their money into a black hole.
Shall we begin?
I said I won’t drag this out, and I won’t. Examples of text which back up the claims I have made above can be found throughout the speech. His grievously mistaken diagnosis in paragraphs 7 (“Tasks that were once done by 1,000 workers can now be done by 100 or in some cases even 10”, and some globalization nonsense), 13 (“I understand [your] challenges… pressure[s] … obligations to shareholders and the pressures [of] quarterly reports. I get it.”), 27-28 (“barriers that stand in the way… [to be fixed through] export deals with India and China, trade deals with South Korea, Panama, Colombia,… [and working] to bring Russia into the international trading system.”), 39 (“too little [regulation]”), 40 (costs of health care before Obamacare), and more pointedly in paragraph 46, where he completely whiffs the dynamism of a free market. Here’s the whole loathsome, economically illiterate analystical paragraph from our Comrade Director in Chief:
We can’t go back to the kind of economy and culture that we saw in the years leading up to the recession, where growth and gains in productivity just didn’t translate into rising incomes and opportunity for the middle class. That’s not something necessarily we can legislate, but it’s something that all of us have to take responsibility for thinking about. How do we make sure that everybody’s got a stake in trade, everybody’s got a stake in increasing exports, everybody’s got a stake in rising productivity? Because ordinary folks end up seeing their standards of living rise as well. That’s always been the American promise. That’s what JFK meant when he said, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” Too many boats have been left behind, stuck in the mud.
I pulled this paragraph in particular out because like so much of the speech, it has a number of things wrong with it. This speech is so monumentally bad that it is difficult to keep up with the problems in it. First sentence, “We can’t go back to the economy and culture…” See, before we even get to talk about why this is all Marxism claptrap devoid of any economic value, we first must wade through a mass of assumptions. Shall we assume that “the kind of economy and culture” were the problem? Shall we assume that things are different now, since we cannot “go back”? Moreover, are we supposed to believe that things are better now (if different), that we should not want to go back? What if it’s just the economy and not the culture? Are either of these within his power to change in the way that he says? Has he changed them? Oy.
Then we get into the economics (such as they are) wherein he trots out his rich-get-richer rhetoric. He wants to beat us over the head with the fact that labor does not hold stock. Well labor is free to purchase as much stock as they like, if they really want to tie their fortunes to that of the company. Or they can just wait for this President to seize stock from employee pensions and simply award it to labor, as he did in the lawless forced bankruptcy of Chrysler, his gift to the UAW. No, the way that our capitalist system ensures through its structure that employees enjoy the benefits of good times is not by forcibly converting them into shareholders–what if they do not *want* to hold stock, but would rather save, or take vacations with their earnings?
The way this is done is through the natural functioning of the marketplace itself, wherein economic good times result in rising wages, increased mobility, new fields to explore, and educational opportunities through companies which find themselves in need of a trained workforce. The people who do not particularly benefit from growth are unionized, stagnant workforces whose comfort depends upon doing the same job for decades, performing the same repetitive tasks for an ever-increasing real wage.
The vapid, content-free “analysis” offered by this President in a speech to the United States Chamber of Commerce, no less, is an insult and an affront. I will assume that he is not trying to bamboozle the premier business organization in America about the nature of business of America, and so I presume that his remarks are genuine, rooted in his actual understanding and intent. And if those are true, he’s lucky he didn’t leave that meeting with a size-12 boat stuck in his own mud.
