“Wherever and whenever I can take steps without legislation…that’s what I’m going to do.” Barack Obama, State of the Union Address, January 28, 2014
In 2008, Barack Obama campaigned on a promise of hope and change, his hope that once elected he would be able to transform the United States into a nation that conformed to his image of a progressive socialist state. His first term started off promisingly with the passage of the Affordable Care Act, legislation he is proud to hear to referred to as ObamaCare. Foolishly, from his perspective, this landmark legislation was misunderstood by the American people, who reacted negatively to its passage by taking control of the House of Representatives away from his faithful follower Nancy Pelosi.
While the Republicans won control of the House in 2010 and were able to block Obama’s other legislative proposals, the President was still reelected by a wide margin because the date for the implementation of ObamaCare had been delayed until after the election, and large numbers of voters believed the President when he told them that if they liked their health care plans they could keep them, which they didn’t find out until after the election was a bald faced lie.
The Republicans, however, retained control of the House, and in 2014 may gain control of the Senate, which was why Harry Reid needed to change the Senate’s rules to allow for approval of Presidential appointees by a simple majority vote. It was the only way to get the President’s most liberal administrative and judicial appointees approved before the 2014 election. While this has given Obama the freedom to appoint men and women who share his socialist philosophy, the President’s legislative agenda remains stillborn.
With his legislative agenda stalled, Obama has resorted to the use of executive orders and administrative regulations to implement as much of his program as possible. He has chosen to selectively enforce, that is to not enforce, Federal immigration and anti-narcotics statutes, and his administration has proposed regulations that will cripple the nation’s coal industry and further block the development of domestic energy resources. The President is prevented from closing the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, but he has accelerated the process of releasing detainees. The fact that at least 30% of those he has had released are conservatively estimated to have returned to the battlefield to kill Americans or are actively involved in planning to carry out terrorist attacks is, Obama apparently believes, a small price to pay for emptying Guantanamo before the end of his term.
The problem for the President is that executive orders and administrative regulations can be reversed by his successor, and if Hillary Clinton’s culpability for the needless deaths of four Americans in Benghazi and her otherwise inept performance as Secretary of State derails her candidacy, then Obama’s successor is likely to be a Republican, and the changes he is effecting through executive orders and administrative regulations will be undone.
The President can take some solace from the fact that even if the Republicans win control of the Senate in 2014, they will lack the votes needed to override his veto, so ObamaCare cannot be repealed or even defunded. It is safe, and by the time the next president is elected, it will be so entrenched as to be as permanent as Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. However, this is small comfort to a man who planned to radically transform America, and for whom Federal control of health care was only the first small step toward the creation of a US National Health Service. After all, Great Britain has had a national health service since 1948, so from Obama’s perspective, it’s high time the US had one too.
Of late, the UK’s National Health Service has come in for quite a bit of criticism, first with the shocking revelations that patients were needlessly dying at a number NHS managed hospitals, and now with the recent reports that thousands of patients with cancer or suffering from macular degeneration and other serious illnesses are being denied the medications they need. Also, the number of people waiting more than 18 weeks for outpatient treatment at NHS hospitals is greater than at any time in the past 5 years. None of this seems to bother Ed Miliband, the leader of Britain’s Labour Party. As Prime Minister, he would repeal the act that made private clinics part of the NHS and see to it that Britons who get fed up waiting for treatment at an NHS hospital and go to a private clinic or another EU country for treatment will no longer be reimbursed by the NHS. Obama has already pushed the US down the road to a single-payer NHS, but if he had the power that Miliband would have, he could place the entire heath care system under Federal management, even if this resulted in giving Americans the same quality of health care as that enjoyed by the British.
Britain’s Labour Party is currently favored to win the next general election in 2015, and if it does its leader, Ed Miliband, will be the UK’s next prime minister. This prospect is so worrying to the Conservatives that the Chancellor, George Osborne, in an attempt to win over low income wage earners who are likely to vote Labour, has called for a rise in the minimum wage even though such a move would almost certainly cost jobs and damage the UK’s fragile economic recovery. The Prime Minister, David Cameron, in an attempt to blunt the appeal of the UK Independence Party in marginal (battleground) constituencies, has promised that if the Conservatives are returned to power he will hold a referendum on the UK’s continued membership in the European Union even though he realizes Britain’s exit from the EU would be an economic and political disaster. Nonetheless, the smart money is still betting on Ed Miliband.
A British prime minister with a solid majority of loyal party followers in Parliament has virtually unlimited powers. However, the prime minister’s powers are more often than not limited by members of his own party. David Cameron is not the first British prime minister to realize the truth of the old adage that in Parliament your opponents sit opposite you, but your enemies sit behind you on your own benches. He has been constrained by his backbenchers on such issues as Britain’s role in the EU and immigration. His coalition partner and deputy prime minister, Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg, is engaged in a battle with his own rank and file over his handling of the alleged inappropriate sexual behavior of a former party bigwig, Lord Rennard.
Barack Obama knows that the Democrats in Congress would never oppose him, and so he dreams of what he could do if he had the power that Ed Miliband will have. He might begin by imposing green (carbon) taxes. The UK’s green taxes are driving up energy prices, and Cameron has promised to repeal them but if he does, Miliband would restore them. Miliband also would prevent further development of domestic energy resources, and then keep energy prices from rising by simply ordering energy companies to freeze their prices. He would break up the largest banks by making them sell off their branches, and of course he would cap banker’s bonuses. Miliband believes that making all companies, not just those in energy and banking, do what he thinks is best will lead to greater social justice and reduce income inequality. He calls his plans for bringing British companies to heel “pre-distribution.” Obama must salivate at the thought, but Samuel Gompers would have been appalled.
Gompers, the union leader who founded the American Federation of Labor (AFL) believed that “the worst crime against working people is a company which fails to operate at a profit.” He understood that a company that doesn’t make a profit goes out of business and its employees lose their jobs. Without profits there can be no investment, and investment is required for the expansion and growth that provides more jobs and better paying jobs. Sir John Armitt, a former CEO of Britain’s Network Rail, is only one of a growing number of business leaders and economists who question whether Ed Miliband understands the fundamental nature of a free market society. According to Sir John, “One thing that can be certain is that when politicians have interfered in markets to the extent where they completely nullify the extent of the market then the economies do a darn sight worse.”
To envision what Ed Miliband’s policies could do for Britain, and what if he had his way Obama’s would do for the United States, one need only look at France with its 11 percent unemployment rate and its anemic 1% economic growth rate. Hollande has done what Miliband will do and what Obama keeps calling on Congress to do, he has increased the taxes of the wealthy, and as a result it is estimated that 400,000 French citizens have taken up residence in London. What Miliband and Obama fail to grasp is that you do not raise the living standards of the poor and the lower middle class by tearing down the rich and the upper middle class. The way to raise living standards as Jeremy Warner, one of Britain’s leading economics commentators, correctly points out is to “give low-earning households the life chances they deserve by investing properly in education and training, and to deregulate in a manner that gives bottom-up innovation and individualism a chance, quashes vested interests, and provides the private sector with the incentives it needs to do the job.”
While there have been some improvements in the performance of American and British students, overall the US and UK are still lagging behind other developed nations in education. Miliband’s answer is to eliminate performance related pay for teachers and to fire any teachers who haven’t met the requirements for qualified teacher status even if they are highly knowledgeable in the subjects they teach and are otherwise excellent teachers. Obama certainly can relate to this; after all, it’s what the teacher unions want. They believe it is better to have a teacher who may not be competent in math, science or any subject for that matter but who has taken the requisite courses in educational philosophy and methods than a teacher who only has subject matter competence and has learned to teach through observation and practical experience.
Serious reform of the educational system is not something Ed Miliband contemplates, and certainly not something Barack Obama dreams about. Tackling that would be hard; taxing the rich and redistributing the wealth in the form of welfare and other government benefits is easier, even if it sends the economic recovery into a tailspin and exacerbates rather than solves the problem of income inequality. But then as Friedrich Hayek observed, “We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.” Sadly, Barack Obama and Ed Miliband show no interest in learning.
