Barack Obama cracks the foundation of American success: Trust

One of the beauties of a free society, particularly one built on the rule of law, free markets and individual liberty is that people are often free to pursue things that are simply not possible elsewhere. Entrepreneurship in the United States thrives like it does in no other place. From restaurants that let you choose how you want your food cooked to more cable channels than your cable box can handle to the frivolity of branded apparel and Christmas antlers, the United States is a study in the science of the division of labor.

Over the course of our American history, the division of labor has grown ever more important. While 150 years ago most people would have hunted or grown their own food, built their own houses and made their own clothes, today virtually none of us do any of those things. That’s because of the division of labor. We have come to depend on one another to do what we do best. Whether as individuals or as cogs in the wheel of a corporate machine, the division of labor allows us to live far richer lives than we ever could if we had to do everything for ourselves.

A key element of that reliance on the division of labor is trust. I will only purchase food from a vendor if I am confident they are not going to poison me. I will only fly with an airline if I’m confident they are sufficiently attending to safety that the plane will not crash. I will only allow a doctor to operate on me if I trust him not to come to work drunk and kill me.

So too it is with the government of free nations. The United States is one of, if not the most free country in the world when it comes to speech – except for college campuses of course. Citizens have put their trust in the Constitution and the government it created. It is that trust that allows them to go about that making widgets or doing whatever they do. They trust and expect – perhaps foolishly – that their elected officials will at least run the government with objectivity and honesty if not with competency and efficiency. Because the citizens trust the public servants to enforce laws and do so with detachment, the citizens themselves don’t have to enforce them or scrutinize official’s every move.

A complementary element of that trust in government is the First Amendment’s protection of the Freedom of Speech. A trust that you can speak your mind and the government will not penalize you for it. Nowhere else in the world is freedom of speech protected like it is here. Try standing on a street corner in Saudi Arabia and badmouthing the Koran. Try speaking out against the government in Russia or Venezuela. Insult some protected group in Canada or Europe and you’ll likely find yourself in court or shackles.

Free speech, particularly as it relates to opposition of government officials is as American as apple pie. Despite the vile and contemptible things said about him with great regularity and impunity, George Bush was hardly the first president to feel the sting of slings and arrows – John Adams and Thomas Jefferson also withered viscous storms of opposition – but he may end up being one of the last. And America will be much worse off for it. Why? Because Barack Obama has succeeded in destroying the trust the American people have in their government.

President Obama’s use of the IRS to tilt the election playing field in his direction is repugnant to everything Americans hold dear. Americans don’t mind a spirited fight, and even expect minor examples of local irregularities, after all, you can’t expect an election where over 100 million people vote to come off without a hitch.

Barack Obama however has done something that no American can condone. As he was getting ready to have his rear end handed to him in 2010 Congressional elections, he decided to use the police power of the government to ensure that he would be victorious two years later.

Of course he was not so transparent as to send in New Black Panther party stormtroopers to “encourage” voters into pulling the Obama lever. No, instead he clandestinely used what is possibly the single most intimidating organization in the United States, the IRS. To be clear, the IRS is far from an efficient bureaucracy, but there is a difference between a dysfunctional tax code and a tax enforcement agency that is explicitly political. This is the latter: not only did his IRS delay or refuse tax exempt status for 500 tea party and conservative organizations across the country, the agency also targeted conservatives and Romney donors for intense scrutiny and public backlash.

Barack Obama won election by a total of over 6 million votes – 5 million of which came from California and New York alone. The election would have gone the other way however if just three states had changed from blue to red: Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Together they cast 19.7 million votes and Barack Obama won the three by a total of 550,000 votes. Not coincidentally, the epicenter of the IRS scandal was Cincinnati Ohio.

To put the magnitude of this malfeasance in perspective, had each of those 500 organizations swayed a mere 500 citizens each in either Florida, Ohio or Pennsylvania, Barack Obama would have lost the election. But they were not able to do so because the IRS violated the public trust by becoming an extension of the Obama campaign. How many other organizations never formed because conservatives could see the writing on the wall and were not willing to jump through hoops just to be stonewalled? How much money was not donated to these organizations and others because donors feared for their livelihoods?

Whether Obama directed this travesty himself, or he merely pointed out the targets for others to harass, he is responsible for the destruction of the American trust. By turning the IRS into the arm of a police state, where one’s associations, donations, speeches and friends are scrutinized in order to stifle dissent and harm your business, he has undermined the single most important element of American society: Trust.

Americans have always looked at the actions of government with a critical and often partisan eye, but for the most part they have bought into the idea that whether it’s the Corps of Engineers, the Department of Education or even the IRS, most of government is run in a largely objective, if often inept, fashion. By using the IRS to intimidate opponents and guarantee himself a second term, Barack Obama has opened a fissure in the American body politic. One wonders how big it will grow and whether the republic can survive. If citizens begin to see the IRS as a thought police, they will begin hiding income and cheating on their taxes, rationalizing that they will be unfairly targeted regardless. And it won’t be limited to the IRS. If citizens begin to believe that the Justice Department is but the enforcement arm of whoever is in power they may begin to react differently when targeted. If citizens believe that the EPA or the Department of Energy have become political vehicles for the reward of friends or the restraint of enemies of the regime in power, they are likely to begin to disregard their rules or edicts.

At the end of the day a free society depends on the willing trust and voluntary participation of the citizens. Barack Obama has broken that trust in a big way. The question is, can the fissure be repaired so that citizens remain willing to openly engage in political debate rather than scheme under the cover of darkness with designs on upending a system they feel is no longer fair? The country survived a relative vaudvillesque version of this scandal forty years ago that ended up in a president’s resignation. Before that FDR, JFK and LBJ were experts at using the agency to pressure opponents, but their misdeeds rarely saw the light of day thanks to a servile press happy to carry their water. Barack Obama isn’t so lucky however and thanks to the Internet and a conservative press his crimes are difficult to deny, even for the blindest of followers. Whether he serves out his term or not, Barack Obama should be seen as the pernicious narcissist he is who sacrificed the public trust for his own self-aggrandizement. For anyone who has been paying attention, none of this is a surprise.

Single Issue Stupidity and Rick Santorum

I remember hearing once that in Shakespeare’s day the cumulative writings an educated person could be expected to encounter over the course of their lifetime was the equivalent one week’s worth of the New York Times. Today things are slightly different in that we get a week’s worth of the New York Times every week – whether we want it or not. In addition, thousands of times that volume of content is every day via print, broadcast and internet media. As such, anyone who doesn’t want to be overwhelmed to the point of becoming catatonic has to focus their attention on sources of news and information they perceive to be reliable, honest and accurate.

Modern voters find themselves in a similar situation. The possible issues about which one might be concerned are literally infinite. From the national unemployment rate, to state referendums to local zoning ordinances, a voter can be overwhelmed with trying to get even a cursory understanding of the issues. Add to those issues dozens of candidates with varying positions and you have a recipe for catatonia. All of this while voters are busy living their lives, raising their kids, spending time with friends etc.

Voters typically deal with this surfeit of choices by narrowing the focus, in a similar way to what they do with information sources, i.e. look to sources they think they can trust. When they see a candidate pilloried on 60 Minutes for wanting to rationalize (aka “slash”) Social Security or when the New York Times runs a piece about how brilliant a particular presidential candidate is, fans of those sources know how to vote. Another way citizens decide who they are going to vote for is by joining particular organizations that seem to be made up of people who share many of their beliefs or values such as various Tea Parties or community organizations.

The extreme of this narrowing of one’s focus is the single issue voter. The person or organization focuses on a single issue upon which they make their decision as to who to vote for. One of the most well known such single issue organizations is the National Rifle Association. The NRA is an advocate for 2nd Amendment rights, which is a strong Constitutional position to take. It’s “incumbent-friendly” policy however is not very logical. It supports many Democrats who, while supporting the 2nd Amendment, shred the rest of the Constitution. In 2010 the NRA supported 53 pro 2nd Amendment House Democrats, most of whom were facing pro 2nd Amendment Republicans. It didn’t matter to the NRA that the House under Nancy Pelosi was running roughshod over the Constitution and therefore, to borrow a idea from Martin Niemöller, once the Constitution was in tatters there would be no 2nd Amendment to protect. Smart.

A similar scenario is playing itself out in the GOP primary and the beneficiary of such absurdity is Rick Santorum. Rick Santorum surged in Iowa and almost beat the regrettably frontrunning Mitt Romney. How did he do it? A big part of it was that he was essentially the last man standing in the anti-Romney corner. A significant part however is his focus on social issues, particularly his strident anti-abortion message. (In Iowa, according to St. Louis Today, among Iowa caucus-goers who regard abortion as their most significant issue, 55% voted for Santorum.)

While the notion of being anti-abortion is certainly mainstream in the GOP, having abortion as a voter’s single issue, or most important issue during what is going to be the most important election in a century makes no sense at all. There are so many threats to the nation as a whole that to base one’s vote on that single issue is absurd – particularly as abortion rates have dropped by 30% in the last 20 years and a president's impact is minimal regardless. How did unborn babies fare in the Soviet Union? Not particularly well. How did unborn girls fare in China over the last three decades? Not well either. Counter-intuitively, the Socialist Mecca of Europe has lower abortion rates than we do, but one wonders if that might be because they’ve stopped having sex or something because they are not having many babies either…

Voting for the candidate who is most vociferous in his defense of your one issue to the exclusion of everything else is suicide. While candidate Rick Santorum speaks about limited government and lower taxes and overregulation on the campaign trail, Senator Rick Santorum was far from a constitutional conservative. He voted in support of most of George Bush’s big government agenda, he voted against NAFTA, voted for steel tariffs and was a huge supporter of earmarks. And just in case there’s some uncertainty as to Rick Santorum’s view of the role of government, in 2004 he laid out his view very clearly:

One of the criticisms I make is what I refer to as more of a Libertairanish right. They have this idea that people should be left alone, be alone to do whatever they want to do, government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulations low, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, that we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues. That is not how traditional conservatives view the world. There is no such society that I am aware of, where we’ve had radical individualism and that it succeeds as a culture.

Obviously Rick Santorum has never heard of the United States. Both his record and his words make it crystal clear that he is no friend of limited, constitutional government. Big government has set us on a course to turn the United States into a socialist / statist Mecca. Unfortunately for everyone involved (and that includes unborn babies) that Mecca is more like a nightmare of economic malaise, sub standard medical care, a lack of individual freedom and long term social decline. Rick Santorum may sound great on babies, but he will do nothing to take us off that path to disaster. Those single issue voters who are supporting him just might want to think again, or consider the prognosis for the country (and its unborn babies) once America becomes an economic basket case and modern day dystopia.

Tea Party vs. the GOP establishment - Begging for a brokered convention...

For much of the last three years, I, like so many others who were so despondent after the election of 2008, assumed that the election of 2012 was finally going to provide the American people with a real choice of philosophies.

On the one side you have President Obama and the progressive / fascist utopia. (Fascist in the economic sense – where private property remains, but government dictates its usage – rather than the Nazi anti-Semitic / nationalist sense.) This utopia is where government plays the role of caretaker of the nation, where government tells citizens what they can and can’t do with their property, what they must buy and where they must invest, where unions have the power to coerce both government officials and private corporations that pay their members salaries.

On the other side the Tea Party was going to make sure that for the first time in 30 years a conservative nominee would be the standard-bearer of the Republican Party. The platform would include radically smaller government, less intrusive government, and lower taxes coupled with a less complicated tax code – maybe even the Fair Tax – and a strict adherence to the 10th Amendment. Life was indeed going to be good again and prosperity would soon come roaring back.

Given the failure of everything progressive, from welfare to education to the USSR to practically the entire European continent, Americans would finally be given the choice between continuing down that well trod path to failure and a going down that forgotten path of economic liberty that was the foundation of American prosperity since the revolution.

Somehow, somewhere along the road leading to that fateful, Solomanic fork in the road, something went wrong. Not on the left. No, President Obama has indeed been as progressive as most of us feared, and in some cases far worse. Actually, the problem is on the right. Where many of us were hoping that the standard-bearer of the GOP would be a clean, if not perfect, conservative, increasingly it looks as if the nominee is going to be someone other than that.

In the one corner we have Mitt Romney who to this day refuses to renounce Romneycare, the Massachusetts disaster that spawned Obamacare. He also was an early supporter of cap and trade, was gullible on global warming, opposes a flat tax or the Fair Tax and shares an unhealthy affinity with Barack Obama for class warfare.

In the other corner we have Newt Gingrich, the guy who sat on a couch with Nancy Pelosi and told us to pressure our leaders to combat climate change. Although he finally admitted that was one of the stupidest things he ever did, there are other candidates for that title. He trashed Paul Ryan’s less than radical tax plan as “conservative social engineering”, supported the individual mandate in healthcare and now wants to harness local boards to determine which illegal immigrants should be allowed to pursue a “Path to legality”. I have to wonder how effective that might be in sanctuary cities around the country like San Francisco, Austin and Denver. As if all of that were not enough, after taking almost $2 million from Fannie & Freddie and praising their work and the GSE model itself, he now wants us to believe that the only thing he did for the money was tell them their businesses were going to fail. Really?

There are of course others in the race and they too are imperfect, but at least with Perry and Bachman you know they are true conservatives mostly dedicated to a smaller government. Unfortunately for the two of them, their campaigns barely register a pulse when it comes to the polls.

At the end of the day one has to ask, what happened to the Tea Party revolution? How is it possible that the two men leading the race for the 2012 GOP nomination are big government, crony capitalist chameleons who are far less inclined to upend the Washington applecart than work with the people driving it? Why are not the leading GOP candidates shouting from the rafters that they will radically slash government spending and regulation, that they will champion a flat tax and that they will impose a strict adherence to the Constitution, particularly the 10th Amendment?

Despite the best efforts of the media and the Democrats to paint the Tea Partiers as racist rubes and the Occupy Wall Streeters as noble sophisticates put upon by the evil capitalist system, the American people recognize the truth. The fact that the PR field is so heavily tilted towards OWS, yet citizens still have a more favorable view of the Tea Party, tells you everything the GOP needs to know about the coming election. If they would simply run a candidate who proudly articulates basic conservative principles, the next election would result in the country being freed from the tightening progressive noose around its neck. Without such a candidate, with just another standard-bearer Americans can’t distinguish from the big government GOP they’ve come to know, Barack Obama may indeed triumph.

With Gingrich and Romney sitting in the pole positions, I find myself pulling for a brokered convention that results in an opening for someone other than Frick and Frack to take the nomination. Someone like Sarah Palin, or even the forgetful but conservative Rick Perry. Sure that’s an unlikely scenario, but at this point the traditional route has brought us two paper tiger conservatives leading the pack. The Tea Partiers and the country deserve an opportunity to make a clear choice between progressivism and conservatism. Let’s hope that somehow the GOP can figure out how to give that to them. Otherwise it may be another four years of hoping for change.