PrintMay 15, 2009
Would you have a personal computer without free markets?
Capitalism is creative. Obama's America promises to be excruciatingly boring, among many other flaws.
So two kids in a garage build something we now call a "micro computer" and end up beating Big Blue IBM and its hulking business empire. And then some Stanford nerds develop the software for Google; now they are the new IBM.
Repeat the story thousands of times, with most of them failing, and you have the digital-silicon-micro-web revolution, a series of technological tsunamis that swamped the old corporations, and the old government-run programs, to make it possible to do what you are doing right now.
Not bad, eh? The personal computer wasn't developed in the old Soviet Union, in spite of its ability to launch Sputniks and missiles, because it never allowed enough room for original individual thought. There are plenty of smart folks in Russia and China and Europe and the Middle East. None of them have done that kind of creative and original pioneering, not because they can't, but because they aren't given the freedom to be themselves. None of the conventional thinkers predicted the microcomputer. It was all because of the wild creative activity of stubborn individuals, working in their garages, or with a new internet protocol, or just canoodling around with their powerful little computers. Which nobody thought they were supposed to even have, a decade before.
Today we are in the midst of yet another wave of technological change, now growing to Gargantuan size, but still under the surface of the ocean. It's the biotech revolution -- based on half a century of scientific breakthroughs in understanding the living cell. The bio-revolution will boggle our minds, and it will begin to change all of our lives in a decade or less. We will soon have stem cells for replenishing living organs. We will be able to do both good and bad things -- just as with computers -- that are not even imaginable today. And nobody in Washington DC will have the remotest idea about it until it happens. Then they will try to control it, of course.
This is a double technological tsunami you and I are living through. The bio revolution is piggybacking on the digital one. Nothing remotely like this speed of technological growth has ever been seen before in all of human history.
But today, our Black Hole Media are convinced that free markets are out of fashion. Which is why they are going down to bankruptcy, finally, and good riddance to ‘em. The Free Market is finally taking out the Old Media, even as they are denying its existence. What a metaphor for blind dogmatism.
It's like sinking in the Titanic while denying the existence of icebergs. What iceberg? Where? Can't see it in all this fog!
Could Obama have done half as well as Bill Gates or Steven Jobs? Of course not. Not just because he's a lawyer, and lawyers are not among the most creative people in the world, to say the least. But also because Obama has a hugely predictable mind. He doesn't think outside of the box; in fact, he is so stuck intellectually that he doesn't even know that his narrow mental lockbox is a box. But it's all old-fashioned Eurosocialism, or, as Jonah Golberg calls it, liberal fascism. It's just the centralized control fantasy of every political elite, with the media sucking up in the most cringe-making way.
Obama is also an establishmentarian. That's the key to his political success. He identifies the most powerful and popular positions, and plays up to them. I don't think he's said a novel or original word in all the months we've watched him. Obama is the consummate careerist, whose only ideology is the promotion of liberal careers.
It's a stunningly boring position for our most "revolutionary" president. But Marxism is a reactionary creed: It's a throwback to monarchy and aristocracy, the old Prussian Ruling Class with a new-sounding dogma.
The funniest example of Obamanismo is the Mexicon PRI: Partido Revolucionario Institucional. It's the institutionalized revolutionary party! If you can say it without giggling you're an automatic member.
That's our Obama. The Chicago Machine as Revolution.
Don't laugh.
In Europe it's now impossible to distinguish the Marx-quoting Ruling Class from the old-fashioned aristocracy. Sometimes it's even the old aristocratic families that are now part of the new aristocracy. Nothing has changed. And just as Europe's ancient aristocracy never forgot anything and never learned anything, the new aristocracy is still wearing concrete boots.
So creativity isn't part of this administration.
Originality of thought just makes them suspicious.
Obamanista is marked by Leftist dogmatism, determined on making the American people obey its predetermined agenda. It is amazingly arrogant, but people who are mentally stuck often are that way; they don't know how they look to others. And they are awfully eager to use and abuse power far beyond their Constitutional role.
Look at the way Obama just trashed one of the few new and good ideas in education reform: School choice in Washington, D.C. It's one of the few escapes for kids stuck in the inner city ghetto, and one of the first thing O did on arriving in Washington is to crush it. Courtesy of the teacher unions. That's disgusting, but it's worse than that:
It's a dismal failure to recognize the power of freedom to liberate kids and families stuck in the Democrat Machine of the inner cities. Dumping school choice a huge mark of Cain against this administration, because it hurts black kids and families most of all. Obama's destruction of the most hopeful education reform program in Washington is symbolic of this whole reactionary administration.
And that is also the answer to David Frum and other Republican careerists who want to dance with Obama. To do so would be to give up the most promising reform tools we have at our disposal, namely the incentive we all have to better ourselves, and to give other people the chance to do the same. Milton Friedman's neo-classical revolution has not yet played out; to the contrary, it has not yet been given a chance to work. Obama is going back to Karl Marx in 1820; but the Friedman revolution of the mid-20th century hasn't been given a chance yet. Intellectual discoveries do not follow the four year political cycle. They take much longer for new ideas to be tested and utilized.
Especially when you have a political class that is completely stuck in old and failed ideas. So we are just recycling the old, old Marxism, but not the new and much more fundamental conservative reforms.
And it will fail, as it always does. Liberals will naturally deny its failure, as they always do. But with a little luck, the middle third of American voters will get it when they get hit bad in their pocket books.
When the time comes conservatives should be prepared to point to all of Obama's fiascos, to initiate some genuine reforms instead.
