"But wait, this is insane: they will kill the golden goose..."

The New America?

The result is that we are witnessing a quiet but insidious revolution. At home, if successful, the state and its vast array of newly hired employees, will administer our health care system, as well as education loans (and that will need a sort of new agency like the Postal Service or DMV). We now take for granted take-overs of much of the automobile industry and financial organizations. Should cap and trade pass, the administration would be dictating energy use. If you add it up — going to the doctor, driving a car, stopping by an ATM, flipping on the lights, taking out a student loan — you could run bump into a lot of new federal bureaucrats. And that’s the point, isn’t it after all?

I doubt anyone in the administration believes that these new public sectors of the economy will be better run. (After all, the Obamas themselves did not wish to live in a city-run housing tract, or send their children to an inner-city public school: wishing to be paid by the government is rather different than relying on the government).

So What’s the Plan?

So the point instead is I think fourfold:

a) those who profit from running these new agencies will be our new anointed class, at the top, Ivy-League technocrats, and lower down among the ranks, the politically deserving: power and patronage;

b) the resultant cost increases will require more taxes on those whose ill-gotten gains should be properly redistributed to the commune; gorge the beast;

c) in political terms, a constituency that either administers or receives federal larges (think of an ACORN/SEIU hybrid) will prove a predictably loyal base in future elections: dependent future voters;

d) federal and state wages and pensions will remind us all during tough times that government “service” is the only steady, reliable, and fair employer: we will all end up the same.

Some readers point out — “But wait, this is insane: they will kill the golden goose. What fuels redistributive government are taxes from the creation of private wealth that demands open markets, incentives for profit, reasonable taxes to allow enjoyment of profits, principled exploitation of natural resources, and government enhancement rather than restriction of business.”

Why Do They Do it?

But I think the Obamians either have not read history and so do not appreciate how statism/socialism/communism have impoverished all that they have touched, or they assume capitalism solely is run by nice-guy billionaires like Buffet, Gates, and Soros who apparently clapped their hands, made a few billion, and then are happy to live on a billion or two and give the rest away to progressive causes.

There is no appreciation that scrappy, often grubby Americans this minute are scrambling on their computer terminals, on their forklifts, in their commuting cars to run a business, provide a service, or move up the employment ladder in hopes of improving their lot and leaving behind something for their kids. They are the engines of capitalism and they don’t often go to Yale, or Rev. Wright’s church, or work at Human Resources Department. And when they all do, we will be in sorry shape.

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