http://lewrockwell.com/napolitano/napolitano75.1.html
Only in America
can a president who inherits a deep recession and whose policies
have actually made the effects of that recession worse get re-elected.
Only in America can a president who wants the bureaucrats who can't
run the Post Office to micromanage the administration of every American's
health care get re-elected. Only in America can a president who
kills Americans overseas who have never been charged or convicted
of a crime get re-elected. And only in America can a president who
borrowed and spent more than $5 trillion in fewer than four years,
plans to repay none of it and promises to borrow another $5 trillion
in his second term get re-elected.
What's going
on here?
What is going on is the present-day proof of the truism observed by Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, who rarely agreed on anything in public: When the voters recognize that the public treasury has become a public trough, they will send to Washington not persons who will promote self-reliance and foster an atmosphere of prosperity, but rather those who will give away the most cash and thereby create dependency. This is an attitude that, though present in some localities in the colonial era, was created at the federal level by Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, magnified by FDR, enhanced by LBJ, and eventually joined in by all modern-day Democrats and most contemporary Republicans.
Mitt Romney is one of those Republicans. He is no opponent of federal entitlements, and he basically promised to keep them where they are. Where they are is a cost to taxpayers of about $1.7 trillion a year. Under President Obama, however, the costs have actually increased, and so have the numbers of those who now receive them. Half of the country knows this, and so it has gleefully sent Obama back to office so he can send them more federal cash taken from the other half.
It is fair
to say that Obama is the least skilled and least effective American
president since Jimmy Carter, but he is far more menacing. His every
instinct is toward the central planning of the economy and the federal
regulation of private behavior. He has no interest in protecting
American government employees in harm's way in Libya, and he never
admits he has been wrong about anything. Though he took an oath
to uphold the Constitution, he treats it as a mere guideline, whose
grand principles intended to guarantee personal liberty and a diffusion
of power can be twisted and compromised to suit his purposes. He
rejects the most fundamental of American values – that our
rights come from our Creator, and not from the government. His rejection
of that leads him to an expansive view of the federal government,
which permits it, and thus him, to right any wrong, to regulate
any behavior and to tax any event, whether authorized by the Constitution
or not, and to subordinate the individual to the state at every
turn.
As a practical
matter, we are in for very difficult times during Obama's second
term. Obamacare is now here to stay; so, no matter who you are or
how you pay your medical bills, federal bureaucrats will direct
your physicians in their treatment of you, and they will see your
medical records. As well, Obama is committed to raising the debt
of the federal government to $20 trillion. So, if the Republican-controlled
House of Representatives goes along with this, as it did during
Obama's first term, the cost will be close to $1 trillion in interest
payments every year. As well, everyone's taxes will go up on New
Year's Day, as the Bush-era tax cuts will expire then. The progressive
vision of a populace dependent on a central government and a European-style
welfare state is now at hand.
Though I argued during the campaign that this election was a Hobson's choice between big government and bigger government, and that regrettably it addressed how much private wealth the feds should seize and redistribute and how much private behavior they should regulate, rather than whether the Constitution permits them to do so, and though I have argued that we have really one political party whose two branches mirror each other's wishes for war and power, it is unsettling to find Obama back in the White House for another four years. That sinking feeling comes from the knowledge that he is free from the need to keep an eye on the electorate, and from the terrible thought that he may be the authoritarian we have all known and feared would visit us one day and crush our personal freedoms.
Reprinted with the author's permission.
Four More Years
by
Andrew P. Napolitano
Recently
by Andrew P. Napolitano: Should
You Vote for President?
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What is going on is the present-day proof of the truism observed by Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, who rarely agreed on anything in public: When the voters recognize that the public treasury has become a public trough, they will send to Washington not persons who will promote self-reliance and foster an atmosphere of prosperity, but rather those who will give away the most cash and thereby create dependency. This is an attitude that, though present in some localities in the colonial era, was created at the federal level by Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, magnified by FDR, enhanced by LBJ, and eventually joined in by all modern-day Democrats and most contemporary Republicans.
Mitt Romney is one of those Republicans. He is no opponent of federal entitlements, and he basically promised to keep them where they are. Where they are is a cost to taxpayers of about $1.7 trillion a year. Under President Obama, however, the costs have actually increased, and so have the numbers of those who now receive them. Half of the country knows this, and so it has gleefully sent Obama back to office so he can send them more federal cash taken from the other half.
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Though I argued during the campaign that this election was a Hobson's choice between big government and bigger government, and that regrettably it addressed how much private wealth the feds should seize and redistribute and how much private behavior they should regulate, rather than whether the Constitution permits them to do so, and though I have argued that we have really one political party whose two branches mirror each other's wishes for war and power, it is unsettling to find Obama back in the White House for another four years. That sinking feeling comes from the knowledge that he is free from the need to keep an eye on the electorate, and from the terrible thought that he may be the authoritarian we have all known and feared would visit us one day and crush our personal freedoms.
Reprinted with the author's permission.
November 8, 2012
Andrew P.
Napolitano [send
him mail], a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey,
is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. Judge Napolitano
has written six books on the U.S. Constitution. The most recent
is It
Is Dangerous To Be Right When the Government Is Wrong: The Case
for Personal Freedom. To find out more about Judge Napolitano
and to read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists,
visit creators.com.
Copyright
© 2012 Andrew P. Napolitano
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