Posted on 04/24/2009 7:37:23 AM PDT by reaganaut1
[Obama] will change American capitalism in fundamental ways--in particular, he will alter the relationship between the government and the economy. My argument rests on what he has actually proposed to do and how his proposals, if enacted, would situate his administration in the history of American economic reform.
Americans have been notoriously loath to undertake reforms that increase the role of government. That goes back partly to our Lockean liberal heritage of minimal government that marks us off from Europe with its absolutist past. The only times that Americans have permitted major changes in government's role have been during economic crises, social upheavals, and war--that is to say, during the Civil War, the Progressive Era and World War I, the New Deal and World War II, and the Sixties (circa 1961-1974). If you look at these periods, and at the intervals between them, you find certain patterns that may help explain what is going on today.
...
[T]he Obama proposals also go well beyond the Sixties in certain respects. First, they pick up on an approach to industrial policy that began circulating among Democrats in the early Eighties, but has never been successfully implemented. That is, its proposals seek to change not merely the pace of production, investment, and consumption, but what is produced and consumed. Most notably, it is using the budget to shift the locus of industrial production toward "green" jobs and products. It is making dramatic changes in transportation with its intervention in the auto industry and in its funding of high-speed rail.
(Excerpt) Read more at tnr.com ...
Yes, he will ‘alter’ Capitalism into Socialism
Two key later paragraphs:
“Finally, there is the sheer size of Obama’s intervention. Obama’s stimulus program and its budget are going to lift overall government spending from the 30s to well over 40 percent of GDP. Its 2009 budget, along with other public spending, could reach 45 percent of GDP. That’s in response to a crisis, but as has happened before, the extent of government intervention is likely to remain permanent .
At the least, the Obama budgets will shift even more dramatically the balance of economic power away from the private and toward the public sector. The American relationship of state to economy will begin to look more like that of France and Sweden, whose non-crisis budgets total over 45 percent of GDP. And our politics may change accordingly—shifting public opinion on regulation, spending, and taxes well to the left. On the relationship of the state to the economy, European “conservatives” (say, Nicolas Sarkozy) are well to the left of our “moderates” and even occasionally our “liberals.” It’s hard to imagine, but the Republicans of the next decade could begin to sound like moderate Democrats today when discussing certain domestic policies.”
and it's a zero sum game; what the central government gains in authority, we necessarily lose as individual liberty.
He must not be allowed to effect the idea of our being a Republic. This is where he must be stopped.
He is trying to end capitalism and replace it with socialism.
Hayek’s rules from Road to Serfdom (as I can remember)
1) There’s no such thing as democratic socialism - everyone has different goals, so those goals must be dictated from the top through authoritarianism.
2) There’s no such thing as a “little bit of socialism” - once central planning starts in one sector, it will not “work” unless it expands to all sectors of society.
3) To attempt to achieve the goals of the central planners, arbitrary authoritarian rule must be used.
4) Those placed in these positions of arbitrary authority must, necessarily, be ruthless and malign.
I don't believe I've ever heard anyone (other than Conservatives) say that Socialism has failed, that socialism needed to change, that socialism needed to better reflect human nature.
We have centuries of failed socialist experimentation but no calls for the theory to be thrown away or even modified. How very odd.
“[Obama] will change American capitalism in fundamental ways”
Going from capitalism to socialism is not changing capitalism. It is abandoning capitalism. Negating capitalism. Eschewing capitalism.
The policies that they are implementing to improve the financial system aren’t working. (The PPIP is a disaster. No one wants to go into business with the government now.)
This is the ‘economy’ the ‘progressives’ voted for. They just didn’t realize it would be this hard to keep the productive working to prop up the unproductive.
Have you turned into a doomsdayer?
Well, they left out a key question. To all of this, we will have high unemployment, slow economic growth, much higher taxes, and probably inflation.
Will Americans just put up with that?
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