- Obama The Hostage

If you watch the replay of Obama’s “Bush Tax Cut Compromise” speech closely, you’ll see that he not only blinks his eyes in the pattern S – O – S, but that he also includes the GPS coordinates for the Washington DC office of the Heritage Foundation. For they surely have a gun to his head (or some other off-camera part of his body) to get him to agree to something he finds so utterly distasteful. I could be wrong about that address; I don’t know Washington very well. I suppose it could be the offices of the AEI, or Cato. But one thing is for sure, it was NOT a speech he was happy about making.

If this guy was put in Washington to foster compromise and a ‘coming together’ and a settling of our differences, he certainly has a strange way of showing it. I’ve never heard such an angry ‘reconciliation’ speech in my life. Or it could be that those terms simply mean the same thing they have always meant when liberals say them: “We won an election now all of our critics should just shut the F#@! up and let us run things our way without public dissent!”.

For his part, the president got another 13 months of unemployment payments for “Obama’s Army” (That growing percentage of people who have made their way in the world exclusively by collecting unemployment benefits since Obama came to office.) This was important to him because Liberals believe that unemployment benefits are the best way to foster economic growth. It's their claim that since the money is spent on consumption immediately it's a good thing. But all this really does is highlight how little liberals understand economics. If it’s so helpful why don’t we all just go on unemployment, all 300 Million of us? The economy should really get roaring then.

What they don't understand is that its really productivity that creates economic growth; In fact it’s even more than that - it’s excess. You take a bunch of metal, plastic, and other raw materials, mix in the cost of some energy, and you make something that people will pay more for than the original stuff you took in. That ‘value added’ – the excess - is the real economic growth, and you can’t have prosperity without it. That’s what’s spent and invested and is the real ‘wealth of a nation’.

What the government needs to do to create more excess is to persuade more people to take a chance and try to create some. But that can't happen if all they do is write them a check and ask for nothing in return. Instead what they’re really doing is taking the value added from one person (who produced it), and giving it to another (who didn’t). That doesn’t create growth it stifles it, and the November payroll data shows that very thing.

Since the government's only net effect is to take a small cut with each redistribution transaction, it's actually lessening wealth not creating it. It’s a parasite on the ‘productive’ part of America. To foster real economic growth we need to get all those people out of ‘public service’ and back into the productive part of the economy and quickly. Because the only way we are going to survive the next decade is with wildfire economic growth. Redistribution and the ‘targeted benefits’ of top down economics will not lead to prosperity. Ever.

Liberals need to understand that ‘profit’ isn’t what you’ve cheated others out of because of your ‘advantages’. It’s what’s left over (if anything) after you’ve paid everyone else. And America needs to start turning a profit again, even if Obama is sympathetic to those who would rather ‘fight’ to prevent it. Only giving ‘economic liberty’ back to all American's has a chance of getting us where we need to go.