Indeed, Obummer has certainly made it clear that zero-sum thinking informs his domestic economic policies — "You didn't build that"; so why not extrapolate to the international community as well?
But his basic presupposition that the economy is a zero-sum game, though wildly unhistorical, is never challenged. Such a view displays virtually total ignorance of our economic system, which is premised on wealth creation. The zero-sum model assumes that the total economic "pie" is of fixed size; it never gets bigger.
Yet the entire history of the U.S. economy shows that the "pie" does get bigger whenever new real wealth is created. A richer society can afford to pay for safety-net programs that give people facing adversity a hand-up. A poorer society cannot do this — it can only borrow money for current expenditures which go 'way past giving people a hand-up; they rather seem to be designed to make such folks permanently dependent on government largesse.
Good economic stewardship requires the government to get out of the way of wealth creation by keeping taxes low and keeping regulation from strangling private initiative, creativity, and risk taking.
Instead, Obummer is the champion of redistribution — expropriating the fruits of private enterprise from the "rich" and giving it to the "poor." His idea of a good economic model is to take as much as he can get away with from the wealth creators, to put it all in a vast pool to be divvied out — at the sole discretion of an increasingly unaccountable federal government — to the "politically favored."
The "politically favored" are basically those people who believe they are entitled to "freebies" at someone else's expense. So Obummer is lining up as many of such people as he possibly can, by telling them that they are "entitled" to have all their needs — food, housing, healthcare, education, etc.., etc. — taken care of by the "rich," in the process making promises he cannot possibly keep.
The government creates exactly NO new wealth (capital) at all: It only shuffles it around to favored constituencies. Thus the entire idea of a "zero-sum game" becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Printing money does not represent an increase in real wealth. What Bernanke is doing is providing so much "monopoly money" to juice the system short-term. Long-term, such a tactic only further erodes the value of existing wealth, making even more people "poorer."
The question that never seems to get raised is this: Where is all the money to come from, to pay for all the promises that Obummer has already made, let alone all those that are still coming down the pike? As people become more dependent on government, government will have to do "more" for them.
But where's the money coming from, if you destroy the private sector? Not to mention that there probably isn't enough money in the world to pay for the expansion of government "obligations" that the Obummer Administration has made.
Soaking the rich isn't going to do it. If you expropriated the entire private wealth of the nation, it wouldn't be enough. The tax increase "on the wealthiest Americans" — the "1%" — set for January 1 is expected to raise only $80 billion a year — about enough to pay for 8 weeks of debt service on our $16+ trillion of national debt [which is itself roughly the size of the current total wealth of the nation] — a whole bunch of which is owed to China, not exactly our most dependable friend in the world.
Laying off the costs to subsequent generations by incurring such incredible debts — our kids and grandkids and their descendants — is grossly immoral. Why should generations yet unborn be asked to pay for current American lifestyle "choices"??? The current generation has no moral right to send its debts to generations yet to come.
Thomas Jefferson put that point thusly:
...a preceding generation cannot bind a succeeding one by its laws or contracts; these deriving their obligation from the will of the existing majority, and that majority being removed by death, another comes in its place with a will equally free to make its own laws and contracts; these are axioms so self-evident that no explanation can make them plainer. — Letter to T. Earles, 1823That is the American understanding of our Republic, formed under the auspices of liberty and law.
Obummer is like a big, fat termite, chewing out the moral core of the nation.
It's time to call the Orkin man....
Dear joanie-f, thank you for yet another splendid commentary on the real situation that we, the American people, are now in! I hope and pray folks will figure it out before November 6th, and vote to put a stop to the Termite-in-Chief.
The “politically favored” are basically those people who believe they are entitled to “freebies” at someone else’s expense. So Obummer is lining up as many of such people as he possibly can, by telling them that they are “entitled” to have all their needs — food, housing, healthcare, education, etc.., etc. — taken care of by the “rich,” in the process making promises he cannot possibly keep.
True sign of a politician. I’ll get yours from them, but you need to back me.
You don’t have to do anything, but VOTE, and get your friends to do the same.
It appears that we are in agreement on just about everything regarding the upcoming election, except maybe for our optimism that Obama will be defeated (I don't know your specific view on that).
Good economic stewardship requires the government to get out of the way of wealth creation by keeping taxes low and keeping regulation from strangling private initiative, creativity, and risk taking.
That, in a nutshell, is the platform on which Romney/Ryan must run, regarding the economy. But I am not convinced they can win, even with such a simple and truthful premise. The media are inundating the minds of the uninformed electorate with nonsense -- such as the fact that Romney has not made his tax returns for the past several decades public, or the fact that he may (or may not) have had a slip of the tongue during a fundraising dinner four months ago. Somehow the 'big picture', and the bone-deep corruption inherent in it, is being lost in a mountain of biased trivia.
I am losing faith that the American electorate is anymore capable of separating the wheat from the chaff. And that inability may prove, more than all else, to spell the demise of our beloved republic.
Best to you and yours, dear sister in Christ --
~ joanie