By Staff
Now that President Barack Obama has taken over the auto and banking industries with shockingly little outrage from the American public he has an almost entirely free hand to pursue his anti-capitalist agenda.
Not precisely a socialist, Obama is more a deluded idealist who believes that everyone can be middlingly successful but nobody needs to be especially well-off.
In Obama's fantasy land, everyone has a house, a decent job, health care and enough money to take a vacation now and then.
It's a nice fantasy, as nobody (except maybe Dick Cheney) wants to see people fail, but it's a fantasy nonetheless as there cannot be success without failure.
Every Obama policy seems to reward people for failing, making bad choices or not working as hard as those of us who manage to get by without government help.
Obama hands out tax credits for folks who don't own a house, authorizes billions to help people who default on their mortgages and doles out government money to businesses that should have paid for their mistakes.
Instead of investing in failure, why not make government money available to successful people and successful businesses? Give General Motors and AIG a few billion dollars and they might continue to eke out an existence. This forestalls people losing their jobs, but it's throwing good money after bad and rewarding companies which did everything wrong.
Why not take the billions wasted keeping these companies afloat and make cheap loans available to people and businesses who demonstrate a pattern of success?
In the private world, if you can show that you have succeeded before, than venture capitalists will give you money much more readily and on better terms than someone with a less-than-stellar record.
Basic logic dictates that money handed to someone who has spent money well before has a better chance of being repaid than money lent to someone who hasn't.
Banks don't look at people who have declared bankruptcy and hand them more cash because they've had a rough go of it and the government should not either.
Obviously, the recession has caused tough times for some people who have made mostly good choices and suffer through little fault of their own.
We should separate those people and businesses from the ones that gambled heavily, took unwise risks and generally behaved irresponsibly.
But, the people who made bad choices and spent money well must not be bailed out.
President Obama must stop his reckless behavior and stop believing that everyone can be saved. He seems like a nice man who feels the pain of the people he serves, but being a leader involves making the right choices for the country in the long run, not bailing people out in the short-term.
If Obama wants to be the great man so many people want him to be, he must make unpopular decisions now that make the country stronger in the long run.
Invest in people and businesses with a track record of success. Allow bad companies to fail and let new, innovative ones rise from their ashes. Let people who can't afford their homes lose their homes and realize that in a capitalist society, not everybody wins. It won't make him popular with the left-wing of his party, but it will be the right choice for this country.
He can be reached at dan@notastep.com or you can see his archive at dbkline.com.