Jay Cost: Obama Is a Rolodex Socialist

Those are my words. Cost says Obama isn't a socialist, according to the usual meaning.

He doesn't believe in revolution.

What he believes in are clients, bagmen, payoffs, and ward-heeling.

It’s not just that Obama is a big government guy in the progressive tradition, which conservatives have opposed for more than a century. It’s also that he’s a client guy, meaning that his idea of big government inevitably has special payoffs hidden in it somewhere. And more than even this, he's a boundless client guy in what should be an age of restraint. Payoffs to party clients are one thing when the economy is growing at a four percent rate per year; that is a situation where the times are so prosperous that government patrons are really just drawing upon the national surplus to satisfy their partisans. But when the economy is growing at less than two percent per year, barely enough to keep up with population growth, paying off party clients is actually like robbing from Peter to pay Paul. And while Obama and congressional Democrats have put off that bill -- in the form of our trillion-plus deficit -- conservatives are not fools. They know they'll be asked to pay up sooner or later, and with a stagnant economy that means less money in their pockets, in part because the president wants to hold together his voting coalition.

That's what's so bad about Obama.

Democrats are just a collection of rent-seekers, beak-dippers, and vig-skimmers, who have convinced themselves that it is not only acceptable that they should collect rents, dip their beaks, and collect a vig on everyone else's transactions, but that to deny them such rents, dippings, and vigs constitutes the most hateful, vicious, and fundamentally un-American behavior they can conceive.

If a guy comes over to your business and begins demanding that you do x and pay y tithe to group z, and is all up in your grill about it, you'd probably either call the cops or spare them the trouble by getting out your gun and telling the miscreant to remove himself from your site or be removed from the earth.

But these cats get a degree in Public Policy and worm themselves up the Media-Distributionist Complex, and suddenly that behavior isn't merely legal -- now they've got the coercive force of the government on their side.

And then they ask: What's the problem? I'm smart. You're not as smart. I am telling you how to better allocate your small pile of money for the benefit of society; and sure, it just so happens my salary is coming out of a skim from your wealth.

Why don't you thank me for telling you how to best direct your own resources, instead of being all angry about it?

They just don't get it and never will. They just don't understand why you're having such a hard time accepting them as your new cadre of government-appointed bosses, ordering you about and taking the larger half of the fruits of your labor.

And they also just don't get that --

1. Even if they were smart, you weren't looking for a new boss.

2. You don't accept that they're that smart. In fact, you think they're kind of douchey faegelas who don't know shit about shat.

3. You also reject the weird premise that a certain type of ability, like intelligence, naturally makes one party a master and a complete stranger a slave. Why shouldn't we just say that physical might creates such a relationship, as was true for the first 10,000 years of human existence?

And what's the ultimate justification for all of this? We voted. A group of us got together and decided we would rather have your wealth in our pockets than your wealth in your pockets.

See, we voted.

Now--

What's so bad about Obama?

posted by Ace at 07:55 PM

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