This Future

I’ve been so busy, I haven’t had a chance to chime in on the BP oil spill. I have seen some good articles, including Tom Bowden’s piece and one by Doug Reich that connected President Obama’s chilling behavior to the villains in Atlas Shrugged. I’m not sure if I’ll have the time or energy to address the issue in detail in future posts. Readers of this blog will probably guess my basic position: that private property and free markets are the means of minimizing the occurrences of such accidents, and provide the best means of cleaning them up if they do occur; that government regulation is not the solution––and indeed, is a source of such accidents; and that BP is responsible for damages it caused, just as any other business or individual would be. Predictably, Mr. Obama is calling for an increase in regulations, is throwing taxpayer money at the problem, and is renewing his call for “alternative” forms of energy. Oh, and like a dictator or street thug, he’s looking for an “ass to kick.”[Note 1.] In other words, as usual, the President is doing everything wrong.

I cannot resist highlighting one comment he made Tuesday night in his Oval Office address, which even among the rest of his bluster stood out to me. Mr. Obama was brazen enough to say, after describing the damage done by the oil spill, “We cannot consign our children to this future.”[Note 2, emphasis mine.] There is simply no comparison between the damage of the oil spill, large as it is, and the utter long-term devastation that the Obama administration, the Federal Reserve, and the Democrats on Capitol Hill have wreaked. (By the way, I’m focusing on President Obama here, but the same criticism applies to Bush, Paulson, etc.) Even just in terms of money, the damage of the oil spill is a drop in the bucket compared to the trillions of dollars squandered, borrowed, or inflated by the government. The larger damage, though, is in the loss of freedom, the erosion of individual rights, which is nearly impossible to win back once it is lost. One cannot measure the cost in human lives of the Obama-Reid-Pelosi health care “reform,” which has set a course to destroying health care outright. If there is a man on earth who has dimmed our hopes for our children’s future, it is Barack Obama.

NOTES

1. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Obama Uses Off-Color Language on Spill,” The New York Times, 7 June 2010, http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/obama-uses-off-color-language-on-spill/?scp=1&sq=ass%20to%20kick&st=cse.

2. Transcript of Obama’s First Oval Office Address, courtesy of The New York Times, 15 June 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/16/us/politics/16obama-text.html?ref=politics&pagewanted=all.