Capital Strike II
If Obama gets his way, America will regress into a third world country. I don’t care whether it’s a conspiratorial desire on his part, or whether he’s simply too stupid to see it. (I believe it’s the latter). Either way it’s wrong. Most Americans sense that Obama has led us down the wrong path, but nobody is yet saying the path we need to get on, and why. That path is private ownership of the means of production: Capitalism.
by Michael J. Hurd, Ph.D.
Paul Moreno, writing in the Wall Street Journal, recently said that Obama will follow Franklin D. Roosevelt’s reelection strategy of 1936, during the Great Depression. “Roosevelt and his advisers blamed the recession on a ‘capital strike,’ trying to deflect public alarm about the United Auto Workers’ sit-down strikes—really illegal occupations of assembly plants—onto the shoulders of corporations. They even claimed that big business was deliberately refusing to invest and increase payrolls as part of a political gambit to destroy the New Deal.” Obama, the most socialist President since FDR, is employing the same tactics. He’s cozying up to the “Occupy Wall Street” movement which offers no policy solutions at all, except the destruction of business through even more redistributive/socialist policies than we already have.
Obama and his supporters blame the failure of capitalism to produce on … capitalists. So why don’t they just get it over with, declare martial law and impose a completely socialist state on the country? More than the Constitution stops them. They know full well that they cannot redistribute without more profit coming from the private sector. They’re looking to blame the private sector for everything, and convince 51 percent of the population this is the case, and then keep the loot coming from there. It didn’t work in the 1930s, and it’s not working now, either. You can debate whether World War II actually ended the Great Depression, but you can’t dispute the fact that the Depression dragged on until that time. Obama’s depression will drag on too, so long as his policies (in much of the Republican party too, by the way) retain their present foothold.
What’s harder about today is that the U.S. is more entrenched in socialist policies than it was back in the 1930s. Back then, FDR was pretty much all that stood between return to a mostly private market or immersion in a government-planned economy, which FDR wanted. Obama came into office after decades of Republican and Democratic policies had massively expanded the welfare and redistributive state way beyond anything FDR dared dream back in 1936.
Still, Obama gets away with blaming the mess on the fact that some people make a profit. Obama is between a rock and a hard place. The more he morally condemns profit and profit-makers, the more he bites the very hand he needs to feed him. Right now, the private sector is on a kind of passive strike. It’s failing to produce, invest or hire, thereby creating the numbers Obama needs to herald an economic recovery and glide into a second term rather than claw his way into it, as now he must.
The best way to defeat Obama would be for the true profit makers to be in open strike. “We’re not going to invest. We’re not going to hire. Why should we? Obama is going to steal it the minute we produce it. The hell with Obama. And the hell with Republicans too, until they prove that they’ll provide for our permanent rights to keep, invest or spend our profits as we see fit.”
I would love to see such a thing happen. It didn’t in the 1930s, and there’s not the slightest indication it will now. But you never know.
Either way, liberalism is stuck. And Obama is stuck. The quiet, passive-aggressive capital strike will undoubtedly continue. Why should people hire and produce for the sake of our politicians and their constituents, who demand something for nothing?
The hell with them.
The greatest hope for a resurgence of capitalism is the fact of having lost it. Capitalism has sustained so many blows over the last century, particularly since the time of FDR, that little or nothing of it will be left if we hack it apart any further than we have. It’s now or never time, both for the USA and capitalism. Either we set capitalism free, to do its thing, or we spend, socialize and nationalize even more.
If Obama gets his way, America will regress into a third world country. I don’t care whether it’s a conspiratorial desire on his part, or whether he’s simply too stupid to see it. (I believe it’s the latter). Either way it’s wrong. Most Americans sense that Obama has led us down the wrong path, but nobody is yet saying the path we need to get on, and why. That path is private ownership of the means of production: Capitalism.
In the end, it’s not Obama’s money. Americans must grow up and let go of their envy and pettiness. We’re all much better off if the self-interested profit-makers are left free to do their thing. So long as we leave the government economic engineers free to do their thing, the disaster will only continue to grow.
Dr. Hurd has a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Psychology, Saybrook Institute, San Francisco, CA, November 1991. Degree awarded With Distinction. Master’s of Social Work (M.S.W.), Clinical, The University of Maryland at Baltimore, May 1988. Bachelor’s of Arts (B.A.), Psychology, Catholic University of America, Washington, DC, May 1985. Distinguished Psychology Student Award, Phi Beta Kappa, Summa Cum Laude. Dr. Hurd blogs at DrHurd.com
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