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President Obama's Hopeless 'Malaise' Moment
President Obama seems frustrated these days lashing out emotionally, intensifying his rhetoric against money-makers, doubling down on his demagoguery, and claiming that heartless GOP rivals want dirty air, unsafe water, poisoned food, and no health care. Mr. Obama blames Congress for not enacting yet more of his destructive stimulus schemes, even as the CBO this week reiterated its prior estimate that Obamas first stimulus scheme ($787 billion, February 2009) will have a net negative impact on GDP over the coming decade.
Mr. Obama says hell spend $1 billion on his coming campaign for re-election gathered, no doubt, from the corporate fat cats he likes to denounce and that thematically hell be running against a do nothing Congress. In fact, if Congress did nothing for Obama over the coming year, it would be doing him a favor.
More pathetic still has been Mr. Obamas recent resort to blaming others as usual, the innocents among us for the abject failure of his own policies. For some inexplicable reason, he said in Orlando last September, Americans have gotten a little soft and didnt have that same competitive edge that we needed over the last couple of decades. In late October he told a gathering in San Francisco that weve lost our ambition, our imagination, and our willingness to do the things that built the Golden Gate Bridge.
Finally, at the APEC meeting last weekend Obama complained to an audience of American CEOs that weve been a little bit lazy over the last couple of decades . . . We arent out there hungry, selling America and trying to attract new businesses into America. Mr. Obamas use of the collective we is an attempt to soften whats really a bullying, despicable insult equivalent to this: You much-vaunted money-makers, those I demonize, you arent working very hard, arent hiring enough, or earning enough to render to me the tax revenues I need.
In just three years Mr. Obama has been such an inspiring leader, confidence-builder, political organizer, and policy-maker that he simultaneously faces a do-nothing Congress, a do-nothing business community, and a do-nothing economy. No wonder most Americans these days tell pollsters theyre dissatisfied with his presidency.
Mr. Obama isnt the first U.S. president to seek re-election by running against a do nothing Congress. Democrat Harry Truman did it in 1948 and beat a weak GOP candidate (New York governor Tom Dewey), albeit in a close vote. Yet unlike Truman, whose famed desktop sign declared the buck stops here, Obama prefers to pass the buck, to deny self-responsibility, and to blame others for his failings. At various times he has blamed the stagnant U.S. economy of 2009-2011 on President Bush, on the financial crisis of 2008, on the Japanese tsunami, the Arab Spring, the European debt crisis, the weather and now, on otherwise productive Americans whove mysteriously become soft, lazy, un-ambitious, and un-imaginative.
At the same time, Obamas administration demands still more taxes from top wealth-creators, blocks bank dividends, precludes Boeing from opening a new plant in South Carolina, stalls deep-water drilling in the Gulf, subsidizes corrupt loss-makers like Solyndra, and nixes the proposed Keystone Pipeline. Is it the case that rich taxpayers, bankers, jet-makers, and oil producers have suddenly become lazy, or instead that they simply refuse to keep slaving away for the privilege of being characterized as malefactors by the president? Why should wealth creators be more ambitious, work harder, or earn more profits, only to hand them over as tax revenues to Mr. Obama, so he can more easily pay the lavish bills he has rung up at the White House?
Mr. Obama has said weve lost our willingness to do the things that built the Golden Gate Bridge, but its surely not true that weve lost the ability to build them. If such things arent built anymore in part its because government now prefers to redistribute wealth than to help create it (by facilitating infrastructure investment), in part because it is over-indebted and simply cant afford it, but primarily because environmentalists have erected legalized barriers to such creations. The greens want to remove existing bridges, dams, and factories not build new ones. If Obama really wanted us to regain our willingness to build great things, hed call off his vicious green dogs.
In blaming the deleterious effects of his own policies on Americans allegedly being soft, lazy, un-ambitious, and un-imaginative, Mr. Obama has had what Id call his malaise moment. Recall President Carters limp speech in July 1979, nearly three years into his term, blaming the disastrous economy on Americans supposedly being in a psychological funk, or in what Mr. Carter called a crisis of confidence. Pundits dubbed it the malaise speech. Malaise is defined as a condition of general bodily weakness or discomfort or a vague, unfocused feeling of mental uneasiness, or lethargy. In his speech Carter said our true problems are much deeper than gasoline lines or energy shortages, inflation or recession, for we are confronted with a moral and a spiritual crisis, such that all the legislation in the world cant fix whats wrong with America.
Mr. Carter said the U.S. economy was broken not because of his own policies but because of a crisis of confidence that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. The problem, he said, is that Americans have always believed in something called progress, but thats no longer feasible; now shortages were the norm, and we can manage the short-term shortages more effectively, but there is simply no way to avoid sacrifice. We should forget about pursuing or expecting prosperity, because weve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning and that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.
Just like Carters anti-capitalist mentality, Obamas also calls for sacrifice (as if thats noble), instead of celebrating those among us who seek to live and gain by creating and exchanging new values, whether material or intangible. For Carter and Obama, those are greedy and selfish pursuits (true) which only deprive our lives of true meaning (false). As such, each man imposed regulatory-spending-tax-monetary regimes that stifled private-sector incentives, sapped entrepreneurial vitality, and chilled investor risk-taking.
If the Obama administration really cared about fostering a new willingness by Americas top wealth-creators to be more ambitious, work harder, and create a more prosperous economy, hed be less hostile to wealth-creators and would rescind his wealth-destroying policies, while adopting truly pro-capitalist ones. Hed heed capitalisms greatest economist, Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832), who said it best two centuries ago:
Mr. Obama claims to want to see an economic revival in America again (or at least before the 2012 election). Yet how many of the statist impediments identified by J.B. Say are the kind Obama would support today? All of them. At root Barack Obama despises capitalism and its moral underpinnings (rational greed), but in times like these (when the prolongation of his power is at stake) he also yearns for its abundant and beneficial effects. He cant and wont ever reconcile this blatant contradiction, and thats the real root of his current emotional frustration and insults.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/richardsalsman/2011/11/20/president-obamas-hopeless-malaise-moment/
President Obama seems frustrated these days lashing out emotionally, intensifying his rhetoric against money-makers, doubling down on his demagoguery, and claiming that heartless GOP rivals want dirty air, unsafe water, poisoned food, and no health care. Mr. Obama blames Congress for not enacting yet more of his destructive stimulus schemes, even as the CBO this week reiterated its prior estimate that Obamas first stimulus scheme ($787 billion, February 2009) will have a net negative impact on GDP over the coming decade.
Mr. Obama says hell spend $1 billion on his coming campaign for re-election gathered, no doubt, from the corporate fat cats he likes to denounce and that thematically hell be running against a do nothing Congress. In fact, if Congress did nothing for Obama over the coming year, it would be doing him a favor.
More pathetic still has been Mr. Obamas recent resort to blaming others as usual, the innocents among us for the abject failure of his own policies. For some inexplicable reason, he said in Orlando last September, Americans have gotten a little soft and didnt have that same competitive edge that we needed over the last couple of decades. In late October he told a gathering in San Francisco that weve lost our ambition, our imagination, and our willingness to do the things that built the Golden Gate Bridge.
Finally, at the APEC meeting last weekend Obama complained to an audience of American CEOs that weve been a little bit lazy over the last couple of decades . . . We arent out there hungry, selling America and trying to attract new businesses into America. Mr. Obamas use of the collective we is an attempt to soften whats really a bullying, despicable insult equivalent to this: You much-vaunted money-makers, those I demonize, you arent working very hard, arent hiring enough, or earning enough to render to me the tax revenues I need.
In just three years Mr. Obama has been such an inspiring leader, confidence-builder, political organizer, and policy-maker that he simultaneously faces a do-nothing Congress, a do-nothing business community, and a do-nothing economy. No wonder most Americans these days tell pollsters theyre dissatisfied with his presidency.
Mr. Obama isnt the first U.S. president to seek re-election by running against a do nothing Congress. Democrat Harry Truman did it in 1948 and beat a weak GOP candidate (New York governor Tom Dewey), albeit in a close vote. Yet unlike Truman, whose famed desktop sign declared the buck stops here, Obama prefers to pass the buck, to deny self-responsibility, and to blame others for his failings. At various times he has blamed the stagnant U.S. economy of 2009-2011 on President Bush, on the financial crisis of 2008, on the Japanese tsunami, the Arab Spring, the European debt crisis, the weather and now, on otherwise productive Americans whove mysteriously become soft, lazy, un-ambitious, and un-imaginative.
At the same time, Obamas administration demands still more taxes from top wealth-creators, blocks bank dividends, precludes Boeing from opening a new plant in South Carolina, stalls deep-water drilling in the Gulf, subsidizes corrupt loss-makers like Solyndra, and nixes the proposed Keystone Pipeline. Is it the case that rich taxpayers, bankers, jet-makers, and oil producers have suddenly become lazy, or instead that they simply refuse to keep slaving away for the privilege of being characterized as malefactors by the president? Why should wealth creators be more ambitious, work harder, or earn more profits, only to hand them over as tax revenues to Mr. Obama, so he can more easily pay the lavish bills he has rung up at the White House?
Mr. Obama has said weve lost our willingness to do the things that built the Golden Gate Bridge, but its surely not true that weve lost the ability to build them. If such things arent built anymore in part its because government now prefers to redistribute wealth than to help create it (by facilitating infrastructure investment), in part because it is over-indebted and simply cant afford it, but primarily because environmentalists have erected legalized barriers to such creations. The greens want to remove existing bridges, dams, and factories not build new ones. If Obama really wanted us to regain our willingness to build great things, hed call off his vicious green dogs.
In blaming the deleterious effects of his own policies on Americans allegedly being soft, lazy, un-ambitious, and un-imaginative, Mr. Obama has had what Id call his malaise moment. Recall President Carters limp speech in July 1979, nearly three years into his term, blaming the disastrous economy on Americans supposedly being in a psychological funk, or in what Mr. Carter called a crisis of confidence. Pundits dubbed it the malaise speech. Malaise is defined as a condition of general bodily weakness or discomfort or a vague, unfocused feeling of mental uneasiness, or lethargy. In his speech Carter said our true problems are much deeper than gasoline lines or energy shortages, inflation or recession, for we are confronted with a moral and a spiritual crisis, such that all the legislation in the world cant fix whats wrong with America.
Mr. Carter said the U.S. economy was broken not because of his own policies but because of a crisis of confidence that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. The problem, he said, is that Americans have always believed in something called progress, but thats no longer feasible; now shortages were the norm, and we can manage the short-term shortages more effectively, but there is simply no way to avoid sacrifice. We should forget about pursuing or expecting prosperity, because weve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning and that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.
Just like Carters anti-capitalist mentality, Obamas also calls for sacrifice (as if thats noble), instead of celebrating those among us who seek to live and gain by creating and exchanging new values, whether material or intangible. For Carter and Obama, those are greedy and selfish pursuits (true) which only deprive our lives of true meaning (false). As such, each man imposed regulatory-spending-tax-monetary regimes that stifled private-sector incentives, sapped entrepreneurial vitality, and chilled investor risk-taking.
If the Obama administration really cared about fostering a new willingness by Americas top wealth-creators to be more ambitious, work harder, and create a more prosperous economy, hed be less hostile to wealth-creators and would rescind his wealth-destroying policies, while adopting truly pro-capitalist ones. Hed heed capitalisms greatest economist, Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832), who said it best two centuries ago:
The healthy state of industry and wealthy is the state of absolute liberty, in which each interest is left to take care of itself. In times of political confusion and under arbitrary government, many will prefer to keep their capital inactive, concealed and unproductive, either of profit or gratification, rather than run the risk of its display. This latter evil is never felt under good government. The interference of authority is not the road to affluence, which results from activity of production, seconded by the spirit of frugality and of frugality tending to accumulation of capital. Capital naturally flows to those places that hold out security and lucrative employment, and gradually retires from countries offering no such advantages. If it be desired that capital in search of employment, and industry in search of capital, should both be satisfied in the fullest manner, entire liberty of dealing must be allowed in all matters touching loans at interest. Wealth is by nature fugitive and independent; incapable of all restraint, it is sure to vanish from the fetters that are contrived to confine it, and to expand and flourish under the influence of liberty. Political economy recognizes the right of property solely as the most powerful of all encouragements to the multiplication of wealth. . . . The legal inviolability of property is obviously a mere mockery where the sovereign power is unable to make the laws respected, where it either practices robbery itself or is impotent to repress it in others; or where possession is rendered perpetually insecure, by the intricacy of the legislative enactments and the subtleties of technical nicety. The temporary dread of taxation, arbitrary exaction, or violence will deter numbers from exposing their persons or their property. Undertakings, however promising and well-planned, become too hazardous; new ones are altogether discouraged; old ones feel a diminution of profit. Whatever renders the condition of the producer, the essential party in every society, more painful, tends to destroy the vital principle of the social body; to reduce a civilized people to a savage state; to introduce a state of things in which less is produced and less is consumed; to destroy civilization.
J.B. Say was the original supply-side economist in the 19th Century, and his 1803 treatise was used as the main economics textbook at most U.S. colleges during that booming and prosperous century. If Says pro-capitalist prescriptions were adopted today wed again witness the great vitality, energy, creativity and prosperity that made America great in the first place. Economics textbooks today are filled with bogus claims about market failure and dogma about governments ability to fix it; they are handbooks not for liberty-loving market-makers but state planners.
Mr. Obama claims to want to see an economic revival in America again (or at least before the 2012 election). Yet how many of the statist impediments identified by J.B. Say are the kind Obama would support today? All of them. At root Barack Obama despises capitalism and its moral underpinnings (rational greed), but in times like these (when the prolongation of his power is at stake) he also yearns for its abundant and beneficial effects. He cant and wont ever reconcile this blatant contradiction, and thats the real root of his current emotional frustration and insults.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/richardsalsman/2011/11/20/president-obamas-hopeless-malaise-moment/
