The Audacity of Power

Candidate Obama attacked Bush for Iraq, wiretapping, military tribunals and Gitmo. Well, we’re still in Iraq, still wiretapping, getting ready for more military tribunals and, notwithstanding his recent rhetoric, it looks likely Gitmo will be around for a while.

On all of these issues he was just playing to his base and had no problem doing 180s when his defense advisors explained the facts of life to him. For Obama, foreign policy is a distraction from his paramount goal, which is bringing the private economy under central government control to achieve socialist objectives.

First, he refuses to let the banks repay the TARP loans. To allow them to do that would mean giving up the power to put in his own managers and directors, set their compensation and tell them who they can loan to. Although he says he should be able to set compensation for financial institutions whether they accept TARP funds or not.

Next came a naked grab of 2/3rds of the US auto industry. Obama branded as “speculators” working Americans who put their retirement savings in auto company bonds and then he cut the value of their holdings by 75% while turning over control of these entities to his political allies, the United Auto Workers, who bear much of the responsibility for the corporate failures.

Then he uses this power to dictate, through arbitrary CAFÉ standards, what kind of cars these companies will be allowed to build in the future. This will require tens of billions of additional taxpayer dollars for retooling. After that will undoubtedly be the redistribution of billions more to bribe consumers into buying these deathtraps. (See National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data showing small car-related deaths.)

These companies will eventually go bankrupt but not before wasting hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars and serving their purposes of paying back the union and forcing Americans into politically correct cars in the name of “climate change.”

As breathtaking as all this is, it is just a warm-up for the real Holy Grail, the government takeover of the United States healthcare system, fully 17% of the US economy.

Is there any limit to “The Audacity of Power?”