The Two Failures of Barack Obama

 

In the latest installment of my weekly column for Defining IdeasI look at President Obama’s State of the Union address and come to the conclusion that he has fundamentally misunderstood the imperatives of his job, both on foreign and domestic affairs:

The President, through his foreign policy, has lost the confidence of his allies across the globe and has emboldened the aggressive behavior of our enemies. Lacking confidence in the United States, our allies will have to fend for themselves, which helps explain the hopeless impasse in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, and the recent coup in Yemen, to which a few drone attacks are no response. There is also the strong likelihood that Afghanistan will lapse into further violence. It boggles the mind that the President can gloss over such massive failures with empty platitudes.

As for affairs at home:

The situation on the domestic front is different. On these issues, the President knows that none of his short-term proposals are likely to get through a Republican Congress that is set against further tax increases and government transfer payments. But he nonetheless charges forward in an effort to build a populist political base that will perhaps in time enact most of his program.

But politics aside, the President wholly fails to understand the importance of economic growth in his relentless attack on economic inequality. The difference between these two programs is striking. A growth-program seeks to expand the size of the overall pie, trusting that the able and hardworking people whom the President lauds will be able to garner their share of the pie. The key point here is that gains from growth are sustainable because no firm has any incentive to back away from employment contracts that work to its own advantage. The hands-off policy thus improves economic incentives and reduces administrative overhead at the same time.

None of this makes the slightest impression on the President, who has concluded that his own brand of “middle-class economics works.” At one level, he is surely correct to insist that everyone “gets their fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.” But it hardly follows that the way to make “working class families feel more secure” is to ply them with a set of educational, housing, and health care subsidies, all of which have to be paid for by someone else, whose life is made less secure by the constant threat of ad hoc government intervention.

You can read the column in full here. This is going to be a long two years.

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  1. user_86050 Inactive
    user_86050
    @KCMulville

    Of course, when the wealthy subsidize a mere transfer system, all it means is that everyone becomes dependent on them. A growth economy allows everyone else to satisfy their needs by themselves.

    • #1
  2. MarciN Member
    MarciN
    @MarciN

    America Alone, by Mark Steyn.

    Pretty soon, the world will be looking to us, and I hope when it does we will have a new president who has had a couple of years to build up the country again.

    • #2
  3. Stad Coolidge
    Stad
    @Stad

    Richard Epstein: he has fundamentally misunderstood the imperatives of his job, both on foreign and domestic affairs

    Not to be flippant, but Obama has defined his job as “What I want to do”, not what he has to do as President.  I was chilled when I heard him say he wanted “to fundamentally transform America.” – into what?  What was so hideously wrong with America in the first place that it required a fundamental transformation?

    • #3
  4. user_278007 Inactive
    user_278007
    @RichardFulmer

    The free market isn’t a pie, it’s a bakery.

    • #4
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