In Defense of Barack  Obama

There are very few evil people in the world.  Most evil is done by well meaning people without the experience, skill, or education to cope with the problems that are thrust upon them.  The president has a desire to help everyone and the only knowledge upon which he has to draw is what has been told him by his friends and educators.  These people have all been collectivists of one type or another.  Without going into a complete explanation of why socialism, fascism, and communism don’t work, the primary answer is they are wasteful of resources.  The biggest resource is the human mind.  Estimates from the former Soviet Union show that from forty to sixty percent of the population were responsible for deciding what resources went to which process or manufacturing facility and what and how much of it would be made.  This created a huge number of people that were creating nothing and getting paid for it.

In a free economy the management numbers are much lower and the decision of what to make and how much to make is voted on every minute by what each individual chooses to buy with his own  money.  Each individual has his mind working all the time on where to find the best value and how to spend efficiently. All this brain power is wasted if the "-isms" make the decisions.  Milton Friedman explains it much better than I can, but trust me. It is true.

The second problem is that all the collectivist “-isms” require that the law be set aside in the name of “goodness”, “fairness”, or “social justice.”  The first victim of collectivism is law. Law is the collective organization of the individual right to defend life, liberty, and property.  The “-isms” set aside the law and rob the individual in order to provide for someone else’s needs or wants.  This problem is caused by people spending too little time with Ayn Rand and Fredrick Hayek.  Please read Atlas Shrugged and The Road to Serfdom.  The simple explanation is that “If you have something that you did not earn, there is someone who created something that he no longer has.”

The thirdl problem that is not understood is stimulus spending. In Economics in One Lesson,  Henry Hazlitt explains how taking money from one person and giving it to someone else to create something creates no new wealth and value is lost in the process.  His example of the broken window in the barber shop is easy to follow. The barber has to spend several hundred dollars for a new window.  The glazer is paid to provide and install the new window. On the surface it looks like value was created and if everyone would just break their windows we could get this economy going again..  What is lost is the fact that the barber had a perfectly good window and it was destroyed.  The money he had to spend on the new window did not go to the tailor for a new suit, or the hardware store for new tools, or any of a number of things that the barber want to buy.  Raising taxes to create jobs is like driving down the street and shooting out windows. 

The final problem is that Obama suffers from the same problem most politicians suffer from.  Using a eighteenth century metaphor to describe the economy.  In Michael Rothschild’s Bionomics: Economy as Ecosystem,   he explains that the economy is not an engine to get back on the track, but a living ecosystem, a rain forest, that is self organizing and cannot be forced.

Call or write the President and respectfully tell him what you have read here.  I believe that he wants to do the right thing but just doesn’t know what that is.

Pat Bratton