Once Again, America Disappoints Its President

Once Again, America Disappoints Its President
"We’ve lost our ambition, our imagination…"
by John Hayward 10/26/2011

Hang your head in shame, America, for you have once again failed to meet the expectations of President Obama.

Attending one of his incessant fundraisers in San Francisco yesterday, the President who led America into stagnancy and downgrade expressed his sorrow at how Americans have “lost our ambition, our imagination, and our willingness to do the things that built the Golden Gate Bridge.”

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Can you imagine what kind of paperwork snarls, environmental impact studies, and ruinous union demands would befall a project on the scale of the Golden Gate Bridge in modern California?

Barack Obama is wrong about a great many things, but this is the thing he’s most comprehensively and dangerously wrong about. America hasn’t “lost” its ambition and imagination. It suffers under plans devised by central planners who lack imagination, and it’s been sternly informed by the Obama Administration that its ambitions are reprehensible.

There are vast numbers of people out there brimming with creativity and drive. What they need most is to have the government’s boot taken off their necks. They need to know they can keep the fruits of their labors, and the rewards of entrepreneurial risk, without being accused of “greed.” They’re hungry for the pure information stream of a market without government interference, in which the true cost of products and resources is apparent to all. They want to reach mutually beneficial arrangements without Big Government micro-management. They need to be able to launch a business without having to blast through a dozen layers of bureaucracy.

Most of all, they need an environment of economic liberty in which the wisdom of a million individual choices is not over-ridden by raw political power. They need a way to escape from Barack Obama’s failed vision. You want to hear a list of companies with an expensive deficit of ambition and imagination? How about Solyndra, SunPower, and all the other “green jobs” failures?

But you’ll never hear Obama make even the slightest allowance that free citizens could succeed where government has failed, if only they were given more economic liberty. That would require the government to grow smaller… a concept that exists nowhere in Obama’s programming. The relentless growth of the State – more taxes, more spending, more regulation – is his unyielding conclusion. If his program hasn’t been running properly so far, there are only two possible bugs: either the State needs to be bigger, or the people need to be better.

Risk, reward, and intellectual adventure await on the high seas of free-market capitalism. They will not be found in the stagnant backwaters of imaginary markets created by rigid socialist ideology. Obama’s lowest points come when he goes past blaming his predecessors and political opponents, and floats the idea that he could have been a success, if only he’d been given a better country to govern.

This isn’t the first time he’s done it, and it won’t be the last. It’s not as if he can run for re-election on his record.
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To read another article by John Hayward, click here.