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An opinionated post by Maynard

They say Obama is off to Washington to give his health care package the final push. The big wheels are grinding toward…what?

I think one of the most fundamental errors of the Left is an excessive focus on economic distribution. The implicit assumption is that if only goods and services are “fairly” shared, then peace and harmony will prevail.

Of course, I, too, think my ideology is “fair”. But I’m more interested in enabling and encouraging individuals to be productive, and I’m opposed to the accumulation of excessive power in a central authority that seizes wealth for “fair” redistribution. On that path lies short-term cronyism and long-term tyranny.

Life has also taught me that people don’t become happy and peaceful just because they’ve got lots of goodies. Material wealth is a fine thing, but possessing it doesn’t diminish the natural human tendency to be lazy and mean and stupid. Whatever our economic situation may be, the true battle is internal and it lies within the human heart. It’s a battle every man and woman must fight.

So much for ideology. What happens next?

Our president has pushed health care reform to the top of his agenda. He intends to get this at the cost of everything else. His success, if he achieves it, will be Obama’s triumph and America’s undoing.

I won’t again repeat the ideological arguments against government health care. My point here is that the finance is a killer. First of all, Washington is undertaking a huge new commitment — which we won’t notice at first, because the expenses are cleverly back-loaded, so it will look like we’re doing just fine for about five years. Second of all, when a leader expends so much political capital on a doubtful issue, he owes a zillion favors — which means any hopes of fiscal discipline in the foreseeable future is out the window, because Congress will be cashing in and bringing home the pork in exchange for their vote.

America’s fundamental economic problem, as I’ve discussed before, is that we’re out balance with respect to national production versus national consumption. We’re living beyond our means, consuming more than we produce, resulting in a horrendous balance of payments deficit. We hemorrhage dollars into the world, and the world absorbs those dollars with increasing reluctance. The trend leads us to a worthless currency and an America that is owned and controlled by foreigners.

The danger of endless “stimulus” programs is that they merely fuel the fire by prolonging and even accelerating the unacceptable status quo. The theory of stimulus is that artificial consumption boosts production, which boosts jobs, resulting in a jump-start of prosperity. The problem is, if the consumption is domestic but the production is abroad, we’re again expanding the debt bubble. That’s why the trade deficit has jumped up during this recession, whereas the normal reaction would be a reduced deficit due to consumer retrenchment. The stimulus, however popular it may be, actually hinders the natural healing process.

A president who was concerned about America’s national interest would be looking to guide America back into balance. Obama is doing the opposite. Because his budget is moving hopelessly out of control, he’s got to borrow from China — and thus he’s got to appease China and other dollar-holding powers. Obama’s snubbing of the Dalai Lama was just a small, visible piece of the picture. For the sake of seizing control of America’s health care, Obama also forfeits his tools to encourage American productivity and balance excessive imports. Obama chooses to collude with foreign tyrants in his pursuit of centralized domestic power, rather than pursue the national interest of a productive America in which Washington does not reign supreme in domestic affairs. Given the option of working with Chinese Communists or American Republicans, Obama decides…well, you see what he’s doing.

In a nutshell, Obama is steering us toward a diminished America and an impotent heartland, with global power ceded to foreign tyrants and domestic power held by Washington bureaucrats. And the economic fallout from this monstrous health care reform package is a key element of the transformation.

Remember that Ronald Reagan won the war against communism by bankrupting the Soviet Union. Nobody understood what Reagain had accomplished until after he passed from the scene. Likewise, Barack Obama intends to win his war against capitalism by bankrupting America, although this, also, will not be understood until it’s too late.

I think plenty of Democrats look at the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) projections and understand the threat. But there’s so much peer pressure, and such an overwhelming feeling that it will be okay somehow; that it “can’t happen here”. Democrats are more afraid of embarrassing Obama than of destroying the nation. Better to court catastrophe than to give the Republicans an edge.

As we steer toward national penury and cower in fear of nuclear ayatollahs, I take scant comfort in a Copenhagen conference that strives to protect us from a 2-degree rise in temperature in the next century. It seems pretty pointless to obsess over the imagined travails of our children’s children’s children while at the same time we’re dumping debt and doom upon the heads of our children.

How does one react to a world gone suicidally mad? I wish I had a plan to overtly save the republic, but I’m drawing a blank right now. Perhaps clarity will be forthcoming. For the moment, there’s nothing to do but shoulder our burden and testify to the truth, and what will be will be.