Barack Obama is as evil as George W. Bush
by Craig J. Cantoni
The political debate in America is essentially a debate between good and evil. It goes like this:
Democrats claim that George W. Bush, Republicans, and conservatives are evil capitalists, jingoists, militarists, and racists. The story line is that these evildoers want to incinerate other nations, discriminate against brown and black people, torture anyone whose religious compass points towards Mecca, foul the environment, encourage greed and avarice, put lead in toys and arsenic in water, force women to use coat hangers to abort the unborn, allow people to writhe in agony on the street as they die from a lack of medical care, and let the poor and elderly live under highway bridges in cardboard boxes.
Republicans claim that Barack Obama, Democrats, and liberals are evil collectivists, socialists, pacifists, and multiculturalists. The story line is that these evildoers want to make America vulnerable to attack, give the Southwest back to Mexico, put everyone on the public dole to achieve total egalitarianism, chain businessmen to stocks on the Capitol Mall, throw newborns into dumpsters, take from producers and savers and give to loafers and spendthrifts, and turn the United States into Cuba or, worse, France.
The parrots in the media then repeat what each side says about the other, as if the parroting is meaningful commentary instead of meaningless squawking.
The two major political parties don’t define good and evil, don’t speak about moral principles, and don’t debate the thinking of such thinkers as Kant, Hegel, Rousseau, Marx, Burke, Locke, Adam Smith, and Hayek.
There is a simple reason why they avoid these subjects but call each other evil: because their own evil would be revealed if they defined terms and spoke about moral principles.
The fact of the matter is that neither of the two parties subscribes to the following two moral principles:
Self-ownership: This principle says that each individual owns his body, his mind, his physical and mental labor, and the fruits of his labor, including his real property, his money, and his thoughts, words, ideas, and writings. As such, each individual has the right to defend what he owns from being poached or harmed, and he has a right to trade what he owns with anyone of his choosing on mutually agreeable terms. If this were not true, then slavery and serfdom would be moral systems.
Limited Force: This principle says that government depends on force for its existence and that the only legitimate use of this power is to protect what each individual owns from being stolen or harmed. All other uses are illegitimate, whether they are promulgated by Congress, by the president, by bureaucrats, by the Supreme Court, or by a majority of voters. It is especially illegitimate for the government to take what an individual owns instead of protecting it. As Ayn Rand wrote, the smallest minority is the individual, and a society that doesn’t protect the rights of the individual doesn’t protect minorities.
It took mankind thousands of years to reach the point in social, political, and economic development where the individual was not at the mercy of an alpha male, a chieftain, an emperor, a king, a lord, or the fevers, superstitions, and whims of a clan, tribe, sect, or mob. The concepts of individual rights and self-ownership, coupled with the division of labor and specialization, brought about great prosperity and longevity. But then these ideas began to be chipped away by madmen, idealists, utopians, and control freaks, some of whom are considered today to have been great presidents.
It’s not as if adherence to the foregoing two principles would leave politicians and pundits with nothing to do. Important questions would still need to be answered. For example: In the name of protecting Americans, was it right to invade Iraq, torture suspected terrorists, drop the A-bomb on Japan, and firebomb Dresden? Why is FDR revered although he interred Japanese Americans in concentration camps without a trial, while George W. Bush is vilified for doing the same with suspected terrorists? Do the rights of the mother trump the rights of the unborn? How can the poor, the disabled, and the sick be helped, treated, and educated without resorting to government force and violating individual rights? Is global warming a scientific fact, is it caused by man, and if so, what should be done about it?
Unfortunately, the Republican and Democrat parties do not restrict themselves to such legitimate issues. Instead, they keep expanding their power over the individual under the guise of the common good.
Medical care is a case in point. After nearly 70 years of destroying a consumer-is-king market in medical care and insurance, politicians have convinced a brainwashed public that they should turn their bodies over to the state and let politicians decide what medical care they receive, from whom, and at what price. Nationalized health care is the opposite of self-ownership.
Another example is subsidized sports stadiums, which are endorsed by both parties. If the use of force can be justified to extract money from individuals for the benefit of other individuals, for something as unimportant as baseball and football, then force can be justified for just about anything. Want free ice cream? Then band together with other ice cream lovers and stick up a Dairy Queen. Want free socks? Then band together with others in need of socks and raid Wal-Mart. Want free health care? Then eat lard all of your life, band together with other lard eaters, and have your arteries unclogged at the expense of those who eat healthy foods all of their lives.
When moral principles are missing from the body politic, we end up with a president like George W. Bush, whose ownership of a subsidized baseball team was a clue that he wouldn’t respect individual rights as president. We also end up with a president [sic] like Barack Obama, whose ambition to use force to remake the nation into his narcissistic image shows that he doesn’t respect individual rights.
Whenever individual rights were not protected throughout modern history, the big evils occurred, such as slavery, Jim Crow, communism, fascism, and Nazism. Slave owners, the Ku Klux Klan, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and other tyrants all had something in common: They believed that the rights of the individual were secondary to the interests of the state, the collective, or the common good. They killed over 100 million individuals to make the point.
Lesser evils continue to this day in the United States, due to subjugating the individual to the state: fatherless children, a permanent underclass, a high dropout rate, packed prisons, a bankrupt nation living on credit, and an unaccountable Federal Reserve that prints money and debases the currency in order to delay the inevitable collapse of the welfare state. Yet in the pursuit of power, our new alpha-male president [sic] pretends that these problems can be solved by increasing dependency even more, reducing self-ownership even more, and printing even more money.
That makes him as evil as his predecessor. But you won’t hear the parrots squawk about that.
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Mr. Cantoni is not a parrot. He is an author and columnist and can be reached at ccan2@aol.com.
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