Understanding Obamas Budget - Road to the Middle Class

Moving towards universal health care.
Increasing government education both at the college level and early-childhood period.
Following through on the notion of a global warming crisis caused by carbon dioxide emissions.

All these actions are perfectly consistent with the liberal world view. In the first place, liberals believe that people should be freed from the burdens and responsibilities of ordinary life in order to enjoy a richer, nuanced experience. The ideal is a creative life as an artist, a writer, or an activist.

Cult author Joseph Campbell rather neatly encapsulated this philosophy with his injunction: “Follow Your Bliss.”

There’s one problem with this notion. It doesn’t work. Most people—nearly everyone—must work. Because underneath the vision of creativity is the reality of creation. We humans are animals that must eat every day and regenerate ourselves in our children.

So if you are going to live a life of creativity, someone else is going to have to do the dirty work of getting and making so that you can do the creating and the spending.

It may seem very harmless, but in practice it comes down to the freeloader problem. Or as Charles Hurt puts it:

Obama’s budget schemes to drain staggering amounts of money from people who worked for it and steer it to people who didn’t.

This isn’t the free market. It’s the freeloader market.

Up in the higher reaches of the educated elilte, people can afford to spend their lives as creative artists following their bliss. Maybe they have a trust fund. Maybe their parents can kick in some Economic Outpatient Care to keep them going. Maybe they have the talent or connections to find a cosy academic sinecure or a berth in a liberal foundation.

But unless you have a strong work ethic, the follow-your-bliss ethic descends quickly into pathology. It ends up as the “freeloader problem.”

There are a lot of people in any society who will game the system so that they can coast along without contributing to society. Mankind has come up with a way of dealing with them. It is called Shame and Guilt, and is usually institutionalized in religion.

But our liberal friends have carefully dismantled the social controls of shame and guilt and have declared war on organized religion. That is because they want to do things that are shameful. They want to have various sexual liaisons. They want to have their health care prepaid. They want to be able to go to school indefinitely. They want to end up, if possible, in some cosy academic sinecure “doing research.” In other words, they don’t want to have to put their shoulders to the wheel and contribute. They want other people to put their shoulders to the wheel.

The huge social consequence of this is only beginning to show up. The consequence is not hard to predict. People have a choice. They can put their life energy into the world or they can take energy out. People that takers will find themselves withering away, condemning themselves to irrelevance.

When President Obama presents a budget that encourages the freeloaders, he is setting on a course that can only end in tears.

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