Obama vs Bush: two views of America

When we were entertained by the eloquence of John Edwards, we were told that there are two Americas. Maybe so - the far-left elites and those enslaved by them, and the rest of us. But what may be troubling and certainly a challenge to President-elect Obama when he takes the oath of office and walks into the Oval Office for the first time as the President of the United States is perhaps the need:

• to reconcile his views of the government growing and controlling more and more through judicial mandate if the legislation can't get passed, and

• to review the free-market system of open and fair competition and creativity that have enabled us to "grow" as a successful and free people.

Socialism or "appearance-based working" stifles creativity and growth. Free enterprise opens up individual creativity and opens the American flood-gates to innovation and new ways of solving our challenges: opens our minds, frees our Souls; and rewards our creativity. The following are two different points of view and frankly, I have never heard any elected "leader" voice the latter views. If you think about the latter view, the concept is chilling and could not have come from a "constitutional" instructor, surely... First, in a commentary written by Lawrence Kudlow, Bush shows Obama the way: As quoted from President Bush's speech on capitalism:

"At its most basic level, capitalism offers people the freedom to choose where they work and what they do...the dignity that comes with profiting from their talent and hard work...The free-market system also provides the incentives that lead to prosperity - the incentive to work, to innovate, to save and invest wisely, and to create jobs for others."

And further:

"Free-market capitalism is far more than an economic theory. It is the engine of social mobility - the highway to the American Dream. And it is what transformed America from a rugged frontier to the greatest economic power in history - a nation that gave the world the steamboat and the airplane, the computer and the CAT scan, the Internet and the iPod."..."The triumph of free-market capitalism has been proven across time, geography, culture, and faith. And it would be a terrible mistake to allow a few months of crisis to undermine 60 years of success."

[I would disagree only that free-market capitalism does not always transcend "culture and faith" as Shariah Finance is not compatible with a free-market ideology.] Mr. Kudlow ends with:

...There is no iron-clad reason why a Democrat can't adopt the economic-growth model that has worked so well and so long for this country."

S.A. Miller has an article today, Voting record clouds Obama's judge picks, which includes a quotation from President-elect Obama made in 2001 and subsequently voiced during the campaign. The perception of the role of the Supreme Court should give all of us pause. From Miller's article:

Mr. Obama put conservatives on guard with a 2001 radio interview, while still a member of the Illinois state Senate, in which he complained that Chief Justice Earl Warren's court - one of the most liberal in Supreme Court history - "didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution" in order to bring about "redistribution of wealth."

Ahmm... The Supreme Court is not supposed to "break free" from the constraints of the U.S. Constitution; it is supposed to uphold, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. It is only supposed to determine if a law passed by Congress is constitutional or not. The Supreme Court is not supposed to "make" law. God knows we have enough people trying to do that. In the 1990s, there were 5,000 bills before the Congress. Give 'em more vacations, I say. What happened to our citizen-statesmen who were supposed to support themselves with work at HOME? I would also point out that since LBJ's Great Society, we have had plenty of "redistribution of wealth" that has led to a separation among our people and has led to part of our social structure being made up of folks who have become dependent upon "government" by legislative design, it seems to me, and another part of our society that is forced through confiscatory taxes on income to support those whom the government has made dependent or "enslaved." We fought a Civil War for a number of reasons and lost over 500,000 men in the process. We ended slavery in the South, not in the North at that time; however, it seems to me that a faction of our political elite won't let slavery go and have just substituted the plantation for government entitlements of many varieties to keep some folks down, mainly the poor - all of our poor - to vote the very folks who enslave them back into office. The rest of us are "enslaved" through confiscatory taxes. It's like the communism of a condo community. You can control your mortgage but you cannot control the condo fee. It is an open ticket to the poor house and likely can equal or surpass your mortgage payment over time. The poor cannot rise out of poverty because government simply will not allow it... Certainly, to me, Democrats enslave the poor by mesmerizing them with the promise of a better life through government subsidies designed to keep them at a subsistence level and designed to "buy" their vote. To former Illinois State Senator Obama, we've had plenty of "wealth redistribution" and "wealth distribution" is NOT the job of a Supreme Court sworn to uphold the US Constitution. Actually, the Founding Fathers did not give the right to vote to anyone who did not have a vested interest - land, property, income - in the how their taxes would be spent. They certainly would not have supported one part of the citizenry legally "stealing" from the producing class. Now soon-to-be President Obama will face a challenge: to clamp down on the American people who are the creators of jobs and of innovation or to reduce taxes, reduce capital gains taxes, and open the flood-gates of American ingenuity to "set our people FREE." Americans can solve our problems - the less government intrusion, the better.