By Mark Rhoads
Every once in a while President Obama comes out of his socialist closet just long enough to unmask his real philosophy as he did last Friday, July 13 in Roanoke, Virginia when he implied that successful business leaders do not deserve credit for their own success but instead they owe more than other people to the nation because it is their obligation to pay their "fair share." His exact words were, "-- look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own."
Too often conservatives have underestimated Obama's unique gift for rhetorical demagoguery that allows him to advance some of the most ludicrous socialist superstitions as superficially reasonable-sounding arguments. Obama went on to say that public employees such as teachers deserve the credit for the success of business leaders. Translation, all good comes from the government in some way. What else would a politician say who has never run any business large or small or created any private-sector job in his entire life? The hard truth is that the current president of the United States is ignorant about how jobs are created in the private sector and about the system of risk and reward that makes any business work at all, let alone be a success.
In President Obama's world, success in business it a bad thing and the motives of business leaders are always suspect unless they are eccentric donors to the Obama campaign. The president talks endlessly about people who do not pay their "fair share" of taxes but never seems to get around to ecxplaining how it is that so many of his supporters pay no taxes at all. While we are discussing how different elements of society do not share in sacrifice for the common good of the nation, when has the Obama Administration ever called on government workers to carry their fair share of sacrfice by cutting back on salaries or benefits that far exceed some of their counterparts in the private sector? When does the government ever pay its fair share?
That argument does not concern a socialist because in the socialist view of the world, citizens only exist to serve the government and all of the fruits of their labor belong to the collective. Individual personal freedom is not important in the socialist worldview, only the desires of elites who run the collective. I am often surprised that old-fashioned Democrats such as Walter Mondale's campaign manager Bob Beckle, co-host of The Five on Fox News, actually get very annoyed when some conservatives refer to Obama as a socialist. One wonders why? Both of Obama's parents were different shades of socialists and in his world view, socialism would be normal. But Beckle and others of the old Democratic Party emotionally choose to be obtuse on the socialism of Obama because it is too uncomfortable to admit that the once-proud party of practical liberals such as Scoop Jackson, Tom Dodd, Jack Kennedy, J. William Fullbight, Albert Gore, Sr., Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Paul Douglas, and Paul Simon is now dominated instead by irrational radical ideological clones of Norman Thomas, Upton Sinclair, George Bernard Shaw, Jack London, or Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Beckle and others argue the Republican Party has gone too far to the right because they are incapable of understanding how far to the left the center of the Democratic Party has moved in recent years. Exceptions to this blind spot among commentators such as Clinton triangle archiect Dick Morris or Carter pollster Patrick Caddell are too few to make an impact with Democratic leaders.
Many ultra-Left Wing Democrats in Congress and state legislatures share Obama's irrational prejudice against successful businesses and that is why business remains a primary target for the politics of envy that is so often a staple of modern Democratic campaigns.
