Posted by
Always To The Right on Tuesday, October 28, 2008 1:26:48 PM
Barack Obama opened a can of worms with Joe the Plumber and his remarks
on government “spreading the wealth”. Over the weekend, an NPR interview from 2001this recap
from a spring 1996 meeting of the Chicago chapter of the Democratic
Socialists of America, which has a 34-year-old Obama talking
redistribution at the beginning of his political career
surfaced in which Obama noted that the failure to achieve
redistributive change through the civil-rights movement was “one of
[its] tragedies”. Today, a reader sends me
Obama, version 1996 and 2001, had no problem talking about
government action to effect redistribution of wealth in communities.
He showed a tendency to see economics as a power display rather than as
a legitimate maximization of capital and profit. Look at Obama’s
analysis of a cutback; according to Obama, the only reason companies
lay people off is to demonstrate power, not to make more efficient use
of funds (or to pay ever-more exorbitant tax costs). That sounds as
though it comes from an outlook more couched in Karl Marx rather than
Milton Friedman. And the Socialists in Chicago ate it up.
What else did the CDSA panel that day suggest? Another speaker, UC
professor Julius Wilson, demanded a new WPA program to employ millions,
which echoes Joe Biden’s repeated suggestions
this election cycle. Jobs would be available to all Americans, “even
Donald Trump, if he chose to do some useful work for a change”. Wilson
never quite gets around to discussing who would pay for a program that employed all Americans, but it’s clear that he’s very, very comfortable with the socialists.