Making us all sick

Let's see if we can figure this out.

The Obama administration is reaching out to Iran, Syria, North Korea, Russia and the Taliban, but insulting Britain.

The Obama administration is giving $900 million to the Palestinians to rebuild the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, and lecturing Israel about not living up to the spirit of the "road map."

The Obama administration is bailing out people who don't make their mortgage payments with the tax dollars of people who do.

The Obama administration is demanding higher FDIC fees from banks that made good decisions in order to bail out banks that made terrible decisions.

The Obama administration is giving tax refunds to people who didn't pay income taxes with the tax dollars of people who did.

Are we beginning to see a pattern here?

Let's hope the Obamas don't try to train their own dog. It will tear somebody's throat out whenever it wants a biscuit.

Every day the Obama administration's policies look less and less like solutions to problems and more and more like Munchhausen syndrome by proxy. That's the psychiatric disorder in which a parent intentionally makes a child sick in order to feel needed and nurturing.

The policies make everything worse, and then the deteriorating conditions provide justification for even more of the policies.

If everyone in America would read Atlas Shrugged we'd be a lot better off, but the novel is a thousand pages long, and at the rate we're going, there's no time to wait for the slow reading group.

So America Wants to Know is going to give away the ending. (Stop reading now if you'd rather read the book and experience the mystery.)

In Ayn Rand's 1957 novel, a collectivist government has taken power in America and placed heavy taxes and crippling regulations on the productive in order to benefit the unproductive.

But then, without warning or explanation, productive people begin to disappear. One day they're at work, and the next they're gone.

Without them, things do not go well.

Things go very badly.

Eventually the economy of the whole country comes to a grinding, screeching halt. Not enough jobs. Not enough food. Not enough electricity.

It turns out (stop reading now if you don't want the ending spoiled) that the productive people of the country have been led out on strike by a brilliant inventor named John Galt. And at the end of the book, he makes a radio address to the nation, pre-empting a government official's scheduled speech.

"You were to hear a report on the world crisis," he says. "That is what you are going to hear."

John Galt identifies himself as "the man who has deprived you of victims and thus has destroyed your world, and if you wish to know why you are perishing--you who dread knowledge--I am the man who will now tell you."

You have cried that man's sins are destroying the world and you have cursed human nature for its unwillingness to practice the virtues you demanded. Since virtue, to you, consists of sacrifice, you have demanded more sacrifices at every successive disaster. In the name of a return to morality, you have sacrificed all those evils which you held as the cause of your plight. You have sacrificed justice to mercy. You have sacrificed independence to unity. You have sacrificed reason to faith. You have sacrificed wealth to need. You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial. You have sacrificed happiness to duty.

You have destroyed all that which you held to be evil and achieved all that which you held to be good. Why, then, do you shrink in horror from the sight of the world around you? That world is not the product of your sins, it is the product and the image of your virtues. It is your moral ideal brought into reality in its full and final perfection.

Ah, for the good old days, when Atlas Shrugged was fiction.

On Friday, U.S. Senator John Kerry wrote a commentary for Bloomberg.com in which he boasted of introducing legislation to stop recipients of federal bailout money from sponsoring golf tournaments and the like:

Clearly, this is no time to party. Economic indicators are deeply troubling. Household debt-to-income levels are at historic highs, and estimates show that homes continue to be overvalued by as much as 30 percent. Many credit-card companies are facing insolvency. And commercial real-estate projects across the nation are quickly coming to their moment of crisis.

What does this have to do with lavish and frivolous spending by TARP recipients? Everything. If Americans continue to lose faith that their tax dollars are being used to rescue the economy, they’ll rebel -- at a time when more painful investments and sacrifices must be made to avoid a deeper and deeper recession.

So that's the plan. More and more federal spending. More and more painful sacrifices.

Washington politicians are worried that Americans will "rebel."

Every thinking person ought to rebel against the idea that people, banks and countries that did the right things should be penalized in order to rescue people, banks and countries that did the wrong things.

Throwing the neighbors into a burning house won't put out the fire.


Copyright 2009


Editor's note: You might be interested in the earlier post, "Barack Obama, angry colonial." And you really should read Atlas Shrugged. It's a great book.

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