Photo Credit: White House
By Adam Bitely — One thing that is true about politicians is that they will always say whatever they can to pass blame for whatever problems are occurring to members of their opposing political parties.
Obama is no different than the rest of the politicians. He routinely passes blame for all of the misfortunes in the country to being brought about by free marketeers and those that would rather the government do nothing than something.
His most common pass-the-blame scheme is faulting every economic woe in America on those that think people should be free to make their own economic decisions, free of government of regulation, and with the ability to fail or succeed. And if you fail, the government isn’t waiting there to provide a bailout.
That notion is foreign to Obama.
Speaking at the University of Vermont, Obama said, “You know, each of us is only here because somebody somewhere felt responsibility, yes to their families, but also to their fellow citizens. Also to our country’s future. That’s the American story. The American story is not just about what we do on our own. Yes, we’re rugged individualists, we expect personally responsibility and everybody out there has got to work hard and carry their weight.”
We are not here because someone felt responsibility for the society. This is most likely code for the government making sure that individuals were taken care of enough to succeed to where we are today — as a collective. Nonsense.
But Obama doesn’t stop there, he goes on and dishes out the usual progressive economic blame game rhetoric.
“It’s been tried in our history and it hasn’t worked,” Obama said. “It didn’t work when we tried it in the decade before the Great Depression. It didn’t work when we tried it in the last decade. We just tried this. What they’re peddling has been tried — it did not work!”
Obama still refuses to set down his partisan hang-ups and examine the lead ups to major economic downturns in the U.S. If he did, we might be spared the uninformed rhetoric that we are frequently exposed to.
If one were to examine the decade before the Great Depression they would discover that government spending was growing. In fact, throughout Herbert Hoover’s presidency government spending ballooned, a trend that FDR happily continued through his presidency. Does government spending and growth sound to you like a government practicing the Obama “you’re on your own” economic theory?
And the same can be said of the Bush years. Deficits grew. Spending ballooned. Bush expanded Medicare, the government’s role in providing education, and importantly, the quasi-government institutions known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were protected from normal market forces.
There isn’t an honest student of free market economics that could suggest that the Bush Administration in the decade leading up to the “Great Recession” practiced Obama’s “You’re on your own” economics.
If anything, in the decades leading up to these economic calamities the government was practicing “The government is on its own to do as it pleases” economics, where the government failed to let failure occur and people to act responsibly.
I know that Obama wants the term “You’re on your own” economics to come across as a negative term, but when you think about the alternative — high unemployment rates and government further encroaching into the private sector — I would take that any day over Obama’s version of economics.
Adam Bitely is the Editor-in-Chief of NetRightDaily.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @AdamBitely.
