Obama's State of the Union: American Failure

President Obama said on Saturday that his State of the Union speech will focus on economic fairness for the middle class.  After listening to him Tuesday, that was entirely right.  But there's always a catch when economic fairness is mentioned.  From listening to his speech you'd think that America's economic problems are as simple as the afternoon your mom accidentally gave your brother a bigger brownie and you whined until she fixed it.  Putting it in that frame of reference makes Mitt Romney's millions seem terribly unfair
and the best way to remedy that is to have a benevolent mother figure take more of Romney's millions and give it to the rest of us. 


So the president's proposal that millionaires pay at least 30% in taxes comes as no surprise, and that will make our economy more fair...won't it?

Let's look at what the president has done so far to promote "fairness."  Does he mean fairness in bankruptcy rules?  Because GM and Chrysler were forced to go through special bankruptcies at the direction of the president, not the courts.  Or maybe he is talking about the kind of fairness that comes with federal bailouts of Wall Street firms? Perhaps he means more legislation like the Dodd-Frank act, which empowers big banks and regulators and shoves the small banks to the curb.  What he really must mean is fairness for homegrown green energy companies, like Solyndra, who got half a billion dollars in federal money and promptly folded  Maybe it is like his fairness for illegal immigrants who commit violent crimes, like Kesler Dufrene (the Haitian who murdered three people after president Obama refused to deport him).  Or maybe he means fairness in upholding the Constitution, like with Operation Fast and Furious?

Probably not.  Economic fairness defined by the president means equality of outcome; i.e. everyone gets the same sized brownie.  That's fine and dandy when mom owns and distributes chocolate goodies, but since when does the government own the economic pie? The president has issued measures to ensure that the outcomes are more equal.  There's the tax on millionaires that he's proposing.  There's also his pay czar, who is supposed to ensure that the companies who are bailed out aren't paying their employees "too much."  Not to mention a host of other federal regulations, like cutting cement plant emissions by 80% (which would make the prices of cement skyrocket), implementing Obamacare, and taking our national debt to over 100% of GDP. Greater opportunity does not come with increased governmental regulations, especially for the middle class.  All this in the name of making the outcome more "equal" (see Cloward-Piven for the theory behind it).

Mandating the outcome doesn't sound terribly American to me.  American has been the land of opportunity from its inception.  From the Puritans in Massachusetts bay colony to the Catholics of Maryland, to the Irish who came during the potato famine, America has afforded them the opportunity to have religious freedom, to lift themselves up by their bootstraps and make a better life.  President Obama recognized that in his speech, when he talked about his grandparents, "every American had a chance to share: the basic American promise that if you worked hard, you could do well enough to raise a family, own a home, send your kids to college, and put a little away for retirement."

All of that is based on the opportunity to try, but not based on forcing the outcome. Economic fairness (read equality of outcome) is something that harks back to Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels, and something that Chairman Mao and Josef Stalin did their best to implement.  The state was the owner of the chocolate goodies, if you will, and ensured equality of outcome.  While many people, including many intellectuals, lament the fall of the USSR and are encouraged by China's growth, we only need look south to Cuba to see the results of equality of outcome: everyone has equal economic results - they're all equally miserable.   

Looking at how things are going in the US today, we're tending that way too.  Real unemployment is hovering around 15%, nearly half of Americans are paying no income tax at all, healthcare costs are rising despite Obamacare's stated purpose, the US bends over backward to not offend a belligerent Iran, etc.  The list goes on and on.  Economic fairness for the middle class seems to mean more government and less individual freedom, and less opportunity for people. 

Why not take a look at someone for president like Rick Santorum who actually knows and understands American values that Obama claims to want to return to, things like a strong military, traditional marriage, freedom from government regulations, and American Exceptionalism. 

I don't know how much we can trust the president's speech.  Where will his blueprint lead us?