Deconstructing Obama

After all the unseemly attention being paid to Joe Wurzelbacher, it seems that the MSM is trying to distract us from thinking about Obama's answer (did they read the fable "The Emperor's New Clothes" and investigate the kid who told the truth?*). So let's analyze it:

It's not that I want to punish your success.

In Obama's world, taxes are punishment. Of course, babies are punishment too.

I want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they've got a chance for success, too.

Think about that: everybody who is behind you. Not the disabled, the ill, the infirm, the elderly. Everybody. The lazy ones who could work but would rather not. The manipulative ones who would rather game the system. The unskilled who make no effort to educate themselves or learn a trade. Everybody.

And how do they get "a chance for success"? By having the government redistribute the earnings of the productive class to them. Now, riddle me this: how does this help them achieve success? Will the lazy become industrious? The manipulative become straight shooters? The unskilled seek education or training? Or will it be a replay of "welfare as we (knew) it", which was so successful in destroying families and individual initiative that even Bill Clinton recognized was a cancer on our society? And who was helped by welfare reform? The very beneficiaries whose lives were being hurt by it.

My attitude is that if the economy's good for folks from the bottom up, it's gonna be good for everybody.

His attitude and reality are at odds. In the video of Joe W's appearance with Huck, Stephen Moore quotes a great line attributed to Dick Armey: "Democrats love jobs but hate employers". Who creates the jobs that will make life better for those at the bottom of the economic ladder? And how do you prevent a race to the bottom, where the strivers who are now near the bottom but want to work their way up look at it and say: If I stay here, that guy working 10-12 hours a day is going to have his money taken from him and given to me. If I succeed, I am the one whose money will be taken. Time for a beer in the backyeard...

I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody.

And the cherry on the sundae: spread the wealth around. No, it's not good for everybody. It's good for nobody. Such a sterling intellect as Obama should surely know that socialism has been a dismal failure everywhere it has been tried. It sounded appealing to me when I learned about it in the sixth grade, but the reality of it turns out to be rather disappointing. Name one socialist society that has succeeded. In Europe, where they have the closest thing to a socialist economy with a democratic form of government, recent elections have tilted away from socialism toward capitalism. And here's the thing: if socialism can't succeed in Europe, where it has every advantage (homogeneous, educated populations foremost among them), how is it going to succeed in a country as large and diverse as ours? It can't and it won't.

However, that has never stopped some people from trying. If only I were the one making decisions about how to spread the wealth, then all would be well. One would have to have a messiah complex to believe that...

* In deference to Daria's last post, I held some posts I had drafted this morning for posting tonight. And wouldn't you know it? PowerLine makes the "Emperor News Clothes" connection. It comes in a post whose title is a play on a long-running favorite of Mark's, "Bring Me the Head of Alfredoo Garcia".