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We, the people, still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity. We must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit. But we reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future. (Applause.) For we remember the lessons of our past, when twilight years were spent in poverty and parents of a child with a disability had nowhere to turn.And so on. Obama later hints at the postmodern nature of his treatment of the issues:
We do not believe that in this country freedom is reserved for the lucky, or happiness for the few. We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, any one of us at any time may face a job loss, or a sudden illness, or a home swept away in a terrible storm. The commitments we make to each other through Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, these things do not sap our initiative, they strengthen us. (Applause.) They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great. (Applause.)
We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity. We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. (Applause.) Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires and crippling drought and more powerful storms.
The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition, we must lead it. We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries, we must claim its promise. That’s how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure — our forests and waterways, our crop lands and snow-capped peaks. That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God. That’s what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared….
Being true to our founding documents does not require us to agree on every contour of life. It does not mean we all define liberty in exactly the same way or follow the same precise path to happiness. Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-long debates about the role of government for all time, but it does require us to act in our time.If one takes the right to liberty seriously, it would be important to determine that the required action does not conflict with or undermine it. Obama does not take the founding principles seriously. His devotion to them serves a rhetorical purpose. Almost anticipating Obama’s second inaugural address, Charles Kesler has written:
His understanding of the past…pays lip service to such things as self-evident truths, original intent, and first principles but quickly changes the subject to values, visions, dreams, ideals, myths, and narratives. This is a postmodern “move.” We can’t know or share truth, postmodernists assert, because there is no truth “out there,” but we can share stories and thus construct a community of shared meaning. It’s these ideas that mark his furthest departure from old-fashioned liberalism.Obama’s living Declaration stands in conflict with the real Declaration, the Declaration of our history. We recall that Abraham Lincoln’s argument with Stephen Douglas also came down to a disagreement over the meaning of the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln articulated this disagreement with special gusto in his critique of Douglas on July 10, 1858.
More and less radical, more and less nihilist—Obama comes in on the “less” side, but then a little bit of nihilism goes a long way. “Implicit…in the very idea of ordered liberty,” he writes in The Audacity of Hope, is “a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or ‘ism,’ any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course, or drive both majorities and minorities into the cruelties of the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, or the jihad.” There is no absolute truth—and that’s the absolute truth, he argues. Such feeble, self-contradictory reasoning is at the heart of Obama’s very private and yet very public struggle with himself to determine whether there is anything anywhere that can truly be known, or even that is rational to have faith in. Anyone who believes, really believes, in absolute truth, he asserts, is a fanatic or in imminent danger of becoming a fanatic; absolute truth is the mother of extremism everywhere.
If we want to preserve the morality of a free-market system, we cannot permit our central bank to carry out monetary policy in ways that play favorites. It’s especially egregious that the Fed has become complicit in drawing off capital into the abyss of deficit financing; clearly, our central bank is catering to the political class, bailing out Washington itself through massive purchases of government debt obligations. Monetary policy today delivers the biggest benefits to the world’s largest borrower—our federal government.Shelton’s article is not long and is worth reading in its entirety.
If we continue to allow the Fed to underwrite deficit spending and inflict the resulting monetary distortions on the people who actually contribute real value to the economy, who live and work in the belief that saving is a virtue, we will witness the steady demoralization of democratic capitalism.
Ben Bernanke’s Fed is printing money at an unprecedented rate in order to keep interest rates low. And plans to keep doing so until the unemployment rate drops to at least 6.5 percent. It is an enabler: The government is borrowing $40 for every $100 it spends (don’t try that in your house or business), and the Fed is printing money with which to purchase the IOUs the government is issuing, and then more so it can send interest payments to the treasury. Jeffrey Lacker, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, fears that the Fed has gone too far and for no purpose, “that just throwing money at the economy is unlikely to solve the problems that are keeping a … worker from finding a good competitive job.” Richard Fisher of the Dallas Fed and Esther George of Kansas City also worry about Bernanke’s no holds barred use of the printing press. Among other things, zero interest rates are causing asset inflation—and shares, land, and house prices that are driven artificially skyward often come down with an unpleasant thud.
Enter the bond vigilantes. At some point investors will decide, as they did in the case of Greece and similarly situated eurozone countries, that the only way the U.S. government can pay its debt is by printing still more money, debasing the currency, and repaying its creditors with dollars worth far less than those it borrowed. At that point the interest rates they demand will shoot up, raising the government’s borrowing costs, driving down the value of the Fed’s portfolio of $2.6 trillion in bonds, driving up mortgage rates, aborting the housing recovery, making it costly for consumers to swipe their credit cards and throwing the economy into recession, or worse. This is a legitimate worry, one that makes the rulers of our biggest creditor, China, more than a little nervous.
A second worry with a realistic basis is that what has come to be called “the new normal” for the American economy includes an irreducible unemployment rate of 7.5 percent. Even if the lower Fed target of 6.5 percent is attainable, some economists reckon that at the current rate of job growth and labor force participation, we won’t get to that target until 2020. Others guess that even if the economy grows at annual rate of 2.25 percent—it is now growing at less than 2 percent, and that was before the recent increase in payroll and other taxes—it will take 5.4 years to get the unemployment rate down to 6.5 percent. The importance of removing impediments to economic growth is demonstrated by a second computation: If the economy would only grow at a rate one percentage point higher—3.25 percent—unemployment would drop to the Fed’s target in 1.8 years.
A final and wholly realistic brick in the wall of worry relates to the policies of the Obama administration. Its regulatory agencies have now filed their agendas for 2013: Proposed new regulations total tens of thousands of pages, with more to come as regulations implementing Obamacare and the Dodd-Frank financial reform law are written. These are not likely to stimulate growth or create jobs for other than bureaucrats.
A congressional delegation led by McCain met with Mohammed Morsi a day after the White House strongly denounced his remarks as “deeply offensive.” Morsi made the comments in a 2010 speech, as a leader in the Muslim Brotherhood before he became president, but they resurfaced recently when aired on an Egyptian TV show.They must think we’re really, really stupid, a belief I am sure they come by honestly. For those who would like a quick refresher, let’s go to the tape, courtesy of the invaluable MEMRI and the related background here.
In the video, Morsi refers to “Zionists” as “bloodsuckers who attack Palestinians” as well as “the descendants of apes and pigs.” He also called U.S. President Barack Obama a liar.
Presidential spokesman Yasser Ali said Morsi told the delegation Wednesday that the remarks were taken out of context, aimed at criticizing Israeli policies, and not Jews. Morsi told them distinction must be made between criticism of what he called the “racist” policies of the Israelis against the Palestinians and insults against the Jewish faith.
Morsi told them the remarks were part of a speech against Israeli aggression in Gaza and “assured them of his respect for monotheistic religions, freedom of belief and the practice of religions.”
Obama thinks he has saved liberalism because he’s put it on the winning side again, and in a big way. He takes pride in showing that the era of big government is not over, that in fact the future belongs to much higher taxes and to much more activist government. I think he’s profoundly wrong about that. Before suggesting why, may I say something briefly about how differently conservatives think, or ought to think, about the relation between principles and politics?
For us, to put it simply, principles are rooted in what our fathers called the laws of nature and of nature’s God. These are timeless, that is, they call to us in every age. Some ages live up to the minimal demands of moral decency and the maximum demands of political excellence better than others; no age lives up to them perfectly. That’s why conservatives are inherently moderate in their demands and expectations of politics, recognizing that neither political defeat nor victory affects the inherent authority and goodness of first principles. Our losses in 2012 are therefore not cause for despair. Like everything in politics they are temporary. We shouldn’t run around like liberals, afraid that the times are against us and that we need to exchange old principles for new ones that allegedly fit the times better. Our calling is, so far as possible, to keep the times in tune with our principles, not to adjust our principles to match the times. As Churchill put it, it isn’t possible to guarantee success in politics or war; it’s possible only to deserve it. By contrast, progressives believe in happy endings, in the inevitability of progress. They cannot separate might from right, success from legitimacy, and so don’t have the consolation of believing in principles in the conservative sense. They insist that the good guys must always or at least eventually win, a standard which elides easily into the deeply immoral belief that, in the end, whoever wins must be right.
