Telecaster
Active member
- Joined
- Sep 26, 2009
- Messages
- 406
- Reaction score
- 62
- Location
- SoCal
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Conservative
American Thinker Blog: Cargo Cult President (updated)
Big Govt is a “Cargo Cult”On February 22, 2010, after well over a year in office and more than three years after announcing his candidacy for President, Obama released his health care reform plan.
Yet he urged Congress to pass health care reform last August.
And with all that time to come up with his own plan, the Congressional Budget Office says the plan is not detailed enough to estimate its cost and other impacts. Per CBO director Douglas Elmendorf, "CBO cannot provide a cost estimate for the proposal without additional detail."
What was released on the White House web site was not even a legislative proposal, but an outline of intentions. One could say that it looks an awful lot like a campaign issue statement.
If not already painfully obvious to anyone paying attention, all the Obama administration can do is campaign. That makes total sense, since Obama had never held an executive or even managerial position in his entire life prior to being sworn into office. But he had tons of experience campaigning and giving speeches.
In short, that's how he thinks the world works: give a speech and publish a public relations brochure on your web site, and the world responds.
He is the Cargo Cult President. At least the real Cargo Cult followers built real things that looked like landing strips to get airplanes loaded with food and supplies to land on them. Obama thinks you get factories to produce things and hospitals to fix people by making speeches -- speeches that are reasonably good imitations of speeches given by real leaders.
(cont)
This explains pretty well why the Right stands apposed to policies of the Left.So, how is Big Govt a Cargo Cult? It’s basically about the attempts by govt to produce economic and social results that mimic the successes of our free enterprise system and our social system of citizens enjoying personal, economic, religious and political freedom.
Govt keeps trying to mimic those forms without doing the actual work, hoping to get results that never come.
A great example is Keynesian economics. The belief is that if the govt imitates what the private sector does, that is, spends money to make money, that prosperity will magically result.
The truth is, the money that private sector investors spend to make money represents value created whose consumption has been postponed. When govt spends money, it has only taken it from the people who earned it, and which does not represent any value created by the govt. So, when the govt spends that money, it doesn’t create value, since the govt doesn’t follow the rules private individuals have to follow to turn their spending into prosperity.
It’s the same with social programs. Money is confiscated and spent, in the vain hope that society will be improved, but it never works, since the rules of improving society, which involve being responsible for the consequences of one’s actions, are never followed by govt giveaway programs.
In a very interesting article in the American Thinker, Randall Hoven describes Obama as a Cargo Cult President, and he makes some very good points.
If we really want to come out of this Obama recession, there is only one way: abandon the Cargo Cult practices of Big Govt, and follow the rules of individual fiscal conservatism.