Obama Back To The Future

WE CONSERVATIVES thought that in 1981 with the election of Ronald Reagan that the United States had taken a path of no return. There could be no return to the disastrous policies of the Carter administration, with its synthetic-fuels energy policy, its inflation, its gas lines, and its retreat in the cold war.

Yes. Remember “synfuels?”

We conservatives believe that government doesn’t do anything well, and does a lot of things really badly.

We thought we had elected Ronald Reagan to put Big Government behind us, gas lines behind us, inflation behind us. We thought that, by the end of the 1980s we had demonstrated beyond a doubt that the future belonged to a low tax state that kept out of the way and didn’t try to administer the economy from Washington DC.

We knew all along that our liberal friends hated all this. But they didn’t dare to poke their liberal ideas above the parapet, at least not without camoflage.

But all along, we can now see, in the morning after President Obama’s first speech to a joint session of Congress, they longed to get back to their liberal agenda. They wanted to direct the economy. They wanted to administer health care and education and increase the government’s power in health and education. And in the thirty years since the end of the 1970s energy crisis they found a new way to politicize the energy business, through the notion of saving the planet from global warming.

We conservatives believe that the administrative society is a recipe for disaster. That’s the Hayek Principle. The man in Washington cannot know enough to direct the economy. Government policies picking winners and losers usually ends up backing the loser. Government administration of health care and education and welfare has been a waste. And increasing the government role is likely to make things worse.

We conservatives think that the global warming notion is mistaken. The earth’s climate fluctuates in all time scales and though the production of greenhouses gases may have affected the climate, the change not likely to be catastrophic. In any case, it will probably be better to adapt to changes in climate rather than try to steer it by carbon taxes and subsidies for renewable energy.

Then there is the question of marginal tax rates. We believe that tax rates should be low and uniform, with a bias towards lower taxes on the lower paid.

President Obama is setting the course of the United States firmly in the direction of the liberal administrative state. We believe that this will end in tears. We also believe that the American people will react pretty strongly against it.

The American people will reject the Obama agenda for one good reason. Call it the Santelli Principle: Government must not make chumps out of ordinary hard-working people by subsidizing idleness and recklessness. Reformers in the late 19th century emphasized this strongly. Welfare, they insisted, must not be bigger than the wage of an unskilled manual worker. Otherwise you make the struggles of the respectable working class worthless. You make them into chumps.

Here’s an example of what I mean, from Politico’s Andy Coller. He’s writing about people upset by President Obama’s $75 billion homeowner bailout plan.

According to the Rasmussen poll, even 49 percent of Democrats oppose mortgage subsidies like the ones Obama has proposed.

Among them: Lynn Powers, 39, a Bethesda, Md., resident who describes herself as a “liberal Democrat” who has been hardworking, prudent and responsible — and now feels “like a fool.”

Maybe President Obama has created a new group of refugees from the Democratic Party: The Santelli Democrats.

Anyway, the battle is joined. The liberals have rejected the Reagan recipe of smaller government and low tax rates. They have started down a path that will either win them the support of the American people for a generation, or they have accelerated the nation towards a disastrous smashup.

One way or another, at the end of it, we shall have decided the direction of the nation. Let’s just hope that not too many people get hurt in the process.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.