Obama's Last Chance

Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, paciencia nostra? (M.T. Cicero)

How long, Obama, will you continue to incinerate our American dream with your fiery nightmarish bombasts? You have turned yourself into the great nihilist, the "creative destructor" of the freedom that is sacred to us Americans.

You are undermining our once great country, great long before you donned the purple of authority. America was then hailed as the greatest thing going. Our institutions, values, and morals were the pride of the whole world, which admiringly looked up to us for inspiration and leadership. You are dismantling the great system that we have gloriously inherited from our founding fathers, a land of the free, remote from the shackles of political ukase and blessed with institutions that have proved to be the greatest prosperity generators ever conceived. We were the dedicated individualists, the men "who broke the trails to the West," unloosed the shackles of overbearing government, and laid out vast new frontiers of civilization. Now, under you, we have become the dregs of civilization, despised and hated by the rest of the world.

Whence is your disposition to destroy all this? We always suspected that your gangrenous Chicago antecedents were dubious, your Alinsky-Wright connections were never reassuring. Whatever streamlets of wisdom that might dribbled down in your stay at Harvard have been sluiced away. Your blustering bravado is wearing thin, we’re sick of your threadbare counsels, your futile promises and the lethal socialism you are perpetrating upon the republic.

You are supposedly the icon of change, but change to where and to what and from where and from what. You are castrating our free enterprise, converting our republic into a fascist oligarchy, worse even than what one Mussolini did to the ill-fated Italians, or our own second Roosevelt, your professed model, who with a 17.2% unemployment, had to fake a war to get us out of his everlasting depression.

We admit that you inherited much of the depravity over which you preside, but instead of chastening it, you have assumed the role of corrupter general, tensing and reforging the shackles that were foisted on us by the former regime.

You have been blowing up our counterfeit money supply to the trillions. Our deficit nears a second trillion and our debt is soaring up to twelve more trillions to such an extent that we will have to borrow fifty cents for every dollar that we spend. And our social security and health deficit nears one hundred billion. You presided over two worthless stimuli, threw away billions in illicit takeovers, you raised our climbing joblessness to near ten percent, and nevertheless daily continue to preach about a prompt recovery (evidenced by a few green bladelets here and there) which our own experts have dubbed as nothing but "fakeroo!"

You have condoned and then presided over the shameless imprudence of our government and central bank, which forced our lending institutions to emit unwarranted mortgages in order to promote a utopian dream of universal home ownership. Our once free banking system, overloaded with overpriced securities and credit default swaps, is now a cesspool of financial pollution. Wall Street, once the vanguard of wealth generation, edged on by Washington, has twisted its investment focus from true wealth creation into generating bursting bubbles from dot.coms to housing to the Dow Jones index and who knows where next. All this caused the demise of Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, AIG, and their ilk, once proud market standard-bearers, that now rot in their puke, after having betrayed not only their investors, but destroyed the aspirations, and the pensions and the lives of many.

Our once renowned capitalists, catapulting from their perch in the highest echelons of the market hierarchy, have abandoned their freedom credentials and have become traitors to the very institutions that made us great. Now instead they stomp upon our newly socialized banking system and plot its total degeneration. These very turncoats have become the embalmers of our once flourishing free enterprises, as they mummify their carcasses, ratifying the putrid unsalable rot that devalues their balance sheets and buttressing them in these holdings of overvalued securities,

Our whole financial system, from the top on down, has become unglued. Our banks have been purloined by the Washington fixers, who have shielded them from their entitled bankruptcy, Now you are bribing them into neglecting their essential function of financing the economic system by paying them fake interest on their dormant reserves.

You have promoted our dollar’s race to ruin. What you and your predecessor have done, with the very dependent servile Fed at your behest, has denuded our once impregnable currency, which has been over multiplied to such an extent that its value is next to worthless, currently quoted as down to two cents of its nineteenth century value. World opinion has begun to wonder out loud just how much longer will our dollar hold out as the world’s currency, and we are beginning to sense the rumbles of a chaotic avalanche, when the whole world at once will have no alternative but to wreak the universal flushout of the dollar.

Nor is it just the naked dollar. With a further wistful look at the insecurity of our Social Security program, that we were counting on for sustenance in our soon-to-be-upon-us old-age, we have already been told just about when the last check will exude from the soon to be bankrupt system. And to make matters even worse, we are in the midst of a general undoing of so many of our once hallowed institutions: in addition to our once world-famed banking and financial system, we are daily being readied for the heralded reinvention of our health care programs, which will supposedly guarantee blissful affordable debtless health for everybody. It seems that our national escape towards romantic fascism hasn’t been doing much fixing, over and beyond the clunkers it has redeemed and the bankrupt entities that it has rescued from oblivion, and the infinite guarantees that our federal Lilliputians are forever making. The never-ending crisis still is as formidable as ever.

You have never understood how the rise of the debt of the government is an attack against freedom. The supposedly hallowed debt of the American people has mushroomed so uncontrollably high (now over half of our GDP) that more and more observers are telling us that it is just not payable, while the outer world holds us to scorn for our profligate indebtedness. Just how many days are left before we renege and tell the world the truth, that it was all a sham and we have no other out than to repudiate it all, that the emperor has no clothes.

You Obama are not interested in freedom. You are the "complete" interventionist. You all but despise the market. You would just as well multiply the 70,000 pages of the federal register with more infinite do’s and don’ts and recreate new cadres of socializing regulators, whereas the ones we had You WANT AN INFINITE CADRE OF REGULATORS, WHEREAS THE ONES WE HAVE weren’t able to distinguish a bubbled up asset from a hole in the ground. The intellectual minions that form your court do not impress. You’ve stacked the inner Beltway with a freedom ignorant cadre, and blessed the legislators who emptied our coffers with every bridge to nowhere that they could conjure up.

You certainly will never enthuse any of us fortunate Americans who have gained our economic wisdom at the feet of great thinkers like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek. Perhaps you have never even heard of them. We told you about them months and years ago, but these days all wisdom is made to dribble down upon us from above and nothing is permitted to rise from the people below. We Austrians, with history, knowledge, and sound theory on our side, have been shouting from the housetops these past months. But all we get in response is neglect, if not outright sarcasm, and the cumulative annihilation of all our sacred principles. What theory, what knowledge, what history do you have to offer us?

Mises showed us that the only viable system for a healthy society is market capitalism. But our leaders have shamefully betrayed their colors, leading us into a practical fascism. Mises warned that the market should be our guide in most situations, and must never be overridden by presuming to invent new institutions. Hayek has shown that institutions cannot be manmade, but can only evolve by spontaneous growth through the daily decisions of a free people, not by the shameless vote maneuvering by a rent-maximizing congress.

What can we do? We must do more than just to expunge the big fakirs, those who ran the central bank into rack and ruin, who converted the nation’s capital into an administrative quagmire, those who think they have the smarts to redesign everything along the way and socialize them, to boot. How to get rid of the Bernankes and the Geithners, the Paulsons before, and then the Reids and the Pelosis, accompanied by the hordes of megalomaniacs like Frank, and Barney and the over-lamented Kennedy. Our representatives and their minions aren’t worth the powder to incinerate them. Their every intervention has been a flop.

But the American people now demand a total reversal of all this muck that you and they are inflicting upon us. Enough of your Obamanical nonsense. Enough of Washington’s works and pomps. There is no other alternative but to make a big stink. And so we demand of you a complete about-face.

First of all, we demand that you, as a start, stop pontificating about your ill-conceived unworkable reforms. Just shut up, as the King of Spain told Chavez of Venezuela and then:

  1. Approve the audit and the prompt elimination of the Federal Reserve Bank with all it works and pomps, including its incessant urge to create liquidity, to buy any and all financial assets, to lending to anybody and everybody, to zero out the rate of interest. It is suicide not to have eliminated the freakish monetary malaise that has been plaguing us since Bretton Woods and, worse, since Nixon’s August 15, 1971, and the downright fatal August of 2008. But you, who pretend to have all the answers, seem to be oblivious of our monetary cancer. Why aren’t you screaming for the return of monetary gold? Why aren’t you echoing Congressman Paul in his fight to undo the Fed? You instead reinstated the culprits, praising their slick policies that continue the plunge of the dollar into oblivion. We now demand that you put the fatal kibosh on the Fed and on its supercilious minions and dump it into oblivion as we did to our first two Central Banks.
  2. Let all modifications of our institutions come from the inherent unplanned creativity of the American people, from spontaneous development, not from a 51 percent vote of our rent-seeking, devil-could-care-less politicians. This refers to banking and finance, to health coverage, to carbon dioxide control. Let the market find its own ways to order our society, conserve energy and preserve the balance of the environment, not with cap and trade or by ceding to the unfounded aspirations of the green ideologues.
  3. Permit the crisis to end as rapidly as possible and generate a return to normal, by your doing just "nothing," that is, "nothing" on your part or that of our fallible government.
  4. Reduce every form of taxes, which have been our greatest impediment to progress.
  5. Gradually eliminate our national debt with sound progressive reductions.

President Obama. You have a maximum of seven more years at the helm. If you reject our proposals, you are a candidate to go down in history as a blight upon our image, a failure, a promiser who could not produce, the cause of recession upon recession. On the contrary, if you really "change" your program and follow our advice, you still have the possibility of emerging as one of the really greats who have occupied the White House. This is your last chance to change things. Do it before the economy implodes into disaster, before the dollar zeroes out, before we have to repudiate our debt, before the HillaryCare and ObamaCare hallucinations freak out. You have been duly warned. Take heed. It is your Last Chance to get America back on track.

October 31, 2009