Victor Davis Hanson
Investor’s Business Daily
4/8/2010
President Obama, in the tradition of progressive Democratic leaders, believes government should ask the more economically fortunate citizens to be responsible for helping the less well off.
But the president seems to fail to acknowledge that there are plenty of actions an individual can take to avoid becoming part of that growing crowd of “less fortunate.” Instead, in Obama’s world, there exists a simple zero-sum melodrama of victims and oppressors.
If recent poll numbers are correct, many Americans find that life in the real world is a lot more complicated than the near-constant us vs. them rhetoric about bad-guy insurers, surgery-hungry doctors, reckless financiers, greedy bankers, heartless corporations and tight-fisted employers who con and hurt the blameless good guys now in need of Mr. Obama’s all-knowing benevolent government help.
Surely life is too complex to be such a fairy-book morality tale…
…The president would surely improve his standing if he urged Americans to buy fewer DVDs and instead more insurance plans — or to avoid drugs and drink, or not to borrow money that they have no desire or ability to pay back, or not to enter the United States in the first place without a proper visa.
Here I do not mean just offering the usual presidential generic good advice and platitudes, but tougher talk — backed up by decisions on policy — about the inability of any government always to make right the freely incurred bad choices of its citizens…
The complete article is at Investor’s Business Daily.
