The moral vacuity of the left

President Reagan started his first State of the Union address (SOTU) observing, “President Washington began this tradition in 1790 after reminding the nation that the destiny of self-government and the ‘preservation of the sacred fire of liberty’ is ’finally staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.’ " 

Like Washington, Reagan respected the moral foundation that invests in government limited political authority and issues temporarily from the sacred liberty of the people.   

This foundational precept of moral authority, understood so profoundly by Reagan, explains his writing the word “freedom” no less than thirteen times in his third SOTU; and invoking “God”, from only whom the unalienable right to liberty flows, eight times.

By contrast that is informative, President Obama’s third SOTU mentioned “freedom” but once—in association with foreign intervention, and “God” just twice—in the traditional blessing Presidents bestow upon the congregation of captive listeners at the end of their homiletic delivery.

Liberating himself from the two cornerstones of the great American experiment, Obama permitted himself a latitudinarian excursion through contra-American philosophy.  We souls who thought we were living in a free society governed within strict and immutable boundaries were treated to an array of new political and economic concepts: “Financial Crimes Unit”, “the Buffet rule”, “smart regulation … and smarter, more effective government”.   What is a “financial crime”, anyway?  Perhaps nationalizing car and mortgage companies ought to be considered.

One may search the canon of economic thought, and not find a thing remotely resembling a Buffet rule: double the capital gains tax rate and a minumum 30% for those earning over $1 million.  Perhaps Marx has something akin to it: taxing the rich, equality of income, fair share, and that sort of thing; but this country wasn’t founded on Marx.

Never mind that the Buffet “rule” is based on the disingenuous axiom that Mr. Buffet pays “only” a 15% tax on his “income”.  The man who prides himself on allocating capital—without government interference—ignores the well accepted principle that corporations in which he invests pay the highest tax rate in the industrial world on their income, before he and every other investor pay that additional 15% on the distribution of those profits.  The multiplicative result of this double taxation: 45%.

One wonders how the shunned men and women of the President’s fiscal commission felt as the President espoused, as easily as he dismissed their hard work, the virtues of a “rule” so arbitrary that it can only end up being coercive. 

Neatly obviating a serious discussion on the national debt, to which failed taxpayer funded “investments” in “clean energy” contributed, and to which failure he smiled an impish “You can’t win 'em all”, Obama boldly pushed more “investment”. 

The only term that comes to mind to describe this incongruous admixture of government money-slushing is “state capitalism”; a self-contradictory term often used by the Economist, published in a country and continent dulled into accepting such matters.  Where is Buffet when we need a rule for making wild bets with taxpayer money?

The left have been trying, as long as they were the left, to make government “smart and effective” as a pretext to have more of it.  The Founders knew the impossibility and imbecility of this utopian dream—precisely why they limited the reach of government. 

From the moral vacuity in left’s notion of government, Obama lauded achievements in regulation, after he finished the prior week forcing the distribution of contraceptives and abortifacients through the Catholic Church.  Smart regulation, meet First Amendment religious freedom.

The former Constitutional professor misquoted Lincoln to justify all this dirigisme. Lincoln actually said, “The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves -- in their separate, and individual capacities.”  

In the closest thing to verbal flag burning ever performed in the Congressional chamber, an emboldened Obama challenged this essence of limited, divided, constitutional government: “With or without this Congress, I will keep taking actions that help the economy grow.” 

Fortunately for individual liberty, Lincoln also said, “We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.”