"The economic truth that eludes Obama is that in a market economy, honest participants prosper to... [+]
Thank you, Barack Obama! You strayed off your carefully prefabricated script and let voters glimpse the real you more than at any time since you let slip your desire to “spread the wealth around” when you bumped into ”Joe the plumber” four years ago.
Your public comments in Roanoke on July 13—“If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen”—were truly astounding. Mitt Romney called your remarks “insulting.” A friend of mine used the word “ignorant.” Both are correct, but I would add another adjective: Marxist.
Argh! Those screams of anguish and howls of protest you just heard were readers on the left, sorely offended that I would dare to apply such an incriminating term to their progressive hero. For them, the truth hurts.
To borrow one of your lines, Mr. President, “let me be clear about this.” I’m not using “Marxist” as an epithet; I’m using it because it is an accurate description.
The left has been getting away with too many word games as they try to protect Obama from being pegged with unpopular labels, and the right too often has been careless and imprecise in its language.
For example, is Obama a socialist? If you define “socialist” in the classic textbook sense, no. Obama hasn’t called for the government to take over and monopolize all the means of production. In fact, because he hasn’t, leading American socialists have disowned him. This gives Obama plausible deniability to charges that he is a socialist.
Obama’s tendencies, however, can accurately be characterized as “socialistic.” He constantly works to increase government control over the private sector; to pick economic winners and losers and to oversee the distribution of property. You’d be hard pressed to name an area where he genuinely prefers a private free market to a government-planned one.
A reader of one of my earlier columns wrote that I shouldn’t view Obama as a threat to individual liberty because Obama is no Pol Pot or Stalin. Well, of course he isn’t. What a flimsy straw man that vacuous statement is! My point is that the loss of individual rights to government power is the slippery slope to tyranny. Isn’t it better to warn about creeping tyranny now rather than wait until that noose has tightened around our neck?
Were Obama’s July 13 remarks Marxist? Yes, in the following ways:
“There are a lot of smart people out there... There are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.”
These declarations show that Obama is still somewhat under the sway of Karl Marx’ defunct labor theory of value. He seems to believe that it is how hard one works or how smart one is that should determine income. The economic truth that eludes him is that in a market economy, honest participants prosper to the extent that they deliver value to others. Value is not the same as effort or potential. It seems that only a minority of people have the talent of successfully and economically providing value for others. Those entrepreneurs are society’s economic benefactors, creating wealth and jobs for their fellow citizens. Contrary to Obama’s views, society’s wealth generators merit respect, not scorn; praise, not derision; gratitude, not envy.
Obama’s remarks were steeped in the collectivistic perspective of Marxism. “If you were successful, somebody along the way gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life... Somebody invested in roads and bridges.”
First, not everyone who has achieved great economic success had a great teacher. In fact, many of America’s greatest entrepreneurs (Franklin, Edison, Lear, Gates and Jobs) either had little formal education or were dropouts. Second, while there have been great teachers (sincere thanks to you!) who have inspired their pupils to success, those same gifted teachers have had hundreds of others pupils who, despite considerable potential, did not achieve great wealth. Conclusion? The successful individual must contain within herself the key to success. Third, as for roads and bridges, we all have been free to use them, so it’s not like the successful received some sort of special favor. It isn’t their fault that most people haven’t arranged the factors of production to create new value and new wealth, for others, and profited thereby.
Obama’s notion that the economically successful should give more back to their fellow citizens—besides ignoring the fact that their fortunes exist precisely because they already have given to their fellow citizens—smacks of Marx’ principle, “From each according to his ability to each according to his need.” In the children’s fable “The Little Red Hen,” the industrious hen did all the work that produced a loaf of bread, and then her neighbors, who hadn’t produced the economic value that the hen had, were perfectly willing to have her share her bread with them.
Marx’ central principle was the “abolition of private property.” Obama, sharing Marx’ hostility to the sanctity of private property, wants to compel the industrious “hens” of our society to share the fruits of their labor with those who have not been as productive, even as he pursues policies that make it harder for existing productive enterprises to function and new ones to get off the ground.
If you care to look it up, chapter two of Marx’ “Communist Manifesto” outlined a gradualist path toward tyranny in societies where the workers failed to impose socialism by armed revolution. Obama marches on that gradualist Marxist path. That fact was never clearer than Obama made it on July 13, 2012. If Obama loses the November election, historians may record that day as Obama’s unluckiest day—the day he showed his naked contempt for free enterprise and individual success and thereby convinced swing voters that he is not the one to lead the United States forward to prosperity.
Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson is an adjunct faculty member, economist, and fellow for economic and social policy with The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College.
