Seraphic Secret On Utopianism and Big Government

From Richard Avrech at Seraphic Secret, an insightful essay on utopianism versus reality and Big Government statism versus capitalism that appears as part of a post on the Health Care bill. He captures in a few paragraphs what I struggle in far more to say:

Seraphic Secret believes in the power of the individual, the power of free markets to effect positive results for a majority of the people.

There is no such thing as a solution for everybody.

That is called utopia and utopian models always end in tyranny if not outright genocide.

Seraphic Secret strongly believes in religious charities such as The Jewish Health Care Foundation of Los Angeles.

Charities flourish when government is least intrusive. But when government assumes control of private initiative charity declines because high taxes drain wallets and people assume that, y'know, the government is taking care of everything.

Remember when computers and other innovative electronics cost the earth? Private industry and competition drove prices down and quality up. The same free market model should and could be used for health care reform.

But Obama and the Democrats have no faith in free markets, no faith in a free American citizenry.

Obama and the Democrats believe in big government, they believe in, well, themselves—a ruling elite.

But big government does not innovate.

Big government does not create new jobs or new markets.

Big government is a cumbersome beast that is concerned, primarily, with maintaining and expanding its own power.

And Big government is the enemy of freedom and decency. Because when you relinquish control of your life to government, you relinquish free choice, you give up on the American dream.

And that is the plague called socialism/communism/collectivism, recast by modern liberals as, ahem, social justice.

You—yes you—are about to sink into a world of new taxes and a grim swamp of government health care.

G-d help us.

Do read Robert's entire post. Robert's essay is a good compliment to one of my favorite Thomas Sowell essays: The Prejudices Of The Elite. If you don't already read Seraphic Secret on a daily basis, I would highly recommend you start doing so.

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Will On Obama, Fantasies & Our Auto Industry

George Will has a great article today pointing out the demagoguery of Obama and the problems of Obama's decision to become the director of our auto industry.

George Will begins his article referring to a fantasy land where people pursue utopian ideas with ever more fanatical focus as all crumbles about them. He then analogizes this to Obama's foray into the auto industry:

At the Academy of Obama, professors and others devise plans for extracting a new and improved automobile industry from a semi-sort-of-bankruptcy arrangement that -- if it survives judicial scrutiny; that is not certain -- will give the United Auto Workers 39 percent of General Motors, with the government owning 50 percent. During future contract negotiations, will the union's adversary be an administration that the union helped to put in power?

The UAW will own 55 percent of Chrysler, . . .

. . . The president's "surgical" bankruptcy plan for Chrysler requires some of the company's lenders, mostly non-banks, to receive less than they would as secured creditors under bankruptcy law.

The law may still make itself heard over the political thunder. Meanwhile, the president faults these "speculators" for not being as cooperative as are most of the banks that have lent to Chrysler. But the banks are compliant because they are mendicants: Having taken the government's money, they are the government's minions.

. . . It is Demagoguery 101 to identify an unpopular minority to blame for problems. The president has chosen to blame "speculators" -- a.k.a. investors; anyone who buys a share of a company's stock is speculating about the company's future -- for Chrysler's bankruptcy and the dubious legality of his proposal. Yet he simultaneously says he hopes that private investors will begin supplanting government as a source of capital for the companies. Breathes there an investor/speculator with such a stunted sense of risk that he or she would go into business with this capricious government?

Its chief executive says: "If the Japanese can design [an] affordable, well-designed hybrid, then, doggone it, the American people should be able to do the same." Yes they can -- if the American manufacturer can do what Toyota does with the Prius: Sell its hybrid without significant, if any, profit and sustain this practice, as Toyota does, by selling about twice as many of the gas-thirsty pickup trucks that the president thinks are destroying the planet.

Obama overflows with advice for Americans who he thinks need admonitions . . . He also advises that this is a good time for Americans to put their hygienic hands on the steering wheel of a new car. He hopes buyers will choose American cars. A sensible person might add: Buyers should choose cars made by the Ford Motor Co.

This is so because Ford has, so far, avoided becoming an appendage of the government. And because the national interest will not be served by GM and Chrysler flourishing. It might cost taxpayers more in the short run, but in the long run it will be less costly for the country if the government finds its confident plunge into industrial policy so unpleasant that, sadder but wiser, the incumbent professors and others will flee from such adventures in extracting sunbeams from cucumbers.

Read the entire article. Its clear Obama wants to force his vision of vast fleets of fuel efficient, small cars on the American public. My own opinion is that he is setting up GM and Chrysler to be moribund corporations that will be, whether wanted or unwanted, long parasites on the American taxpayer, and thus at his beck and call.

It is an utter atrocity that Obama is being allowed to pursue both his payoff to big Labor and his strong-arming of "speculators" who have every right to the protection of the law, all unremarked by a press corps that is now, seemingly, an arm of the government. Indeed, there is no need to create a Ministry of Propaganda, that is one executive department that was already formed and fully staffed on day one.

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