We don't have to work too hard to envision what Obama's Post-Capitalist America will look like, because it's here already. The basic ingredients bureaucratization and overregulation have already destroyed sizable chunks of American industry and business over a number of decades. Now with nationalization on the table, we're getting the first glimpses of what the American auto industry and medicine will look like, nationalized.
Creeping socialism has steadily made American businesses less competitive and more dependent on government funds. Environmentalism is only the latest and most destructive incarnation of government initiatives that have on the one hand crippled businesses, and on the other hand transformed them into beggars looking for a government handout. Going "green" for businesses means added expenses on the one hand, and government subsidies on the other, turning a "Green" business into a post-capitalist socialist enterprise that is not competitive but exists on government subsidies. A model that will insure that American businesses follow European businesses into obsolescence.
The planned obsolescence of American business is high on Obama's agenda. And it is a process that began with the overregulation and taxation of business that killed American industry, driving factories overseas and business to cheaper overseas competitors. The Obama administration's focus on the environment is meant to use environmental regulations to dismantle what's left of American industry, beginning with coal and ending everywhere else. Those industries that remain will be union run, government subsidized dinosaurs, more at home in the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea, than in the booming America of the 20th century.
However American domestic businesses will not fare much better either. The already shaky retail chains will have a great deal of trouble surviving an ongoing recession. Aside from the discount superchains, they require increasing prosperity to drive consumer spending. Detroit serves as a preview of what American cities will look like if Obama gets his way.
They call this the Motor City, but you have to leave town to buy a Chrysler or a Jeep. Borders Inc. was founded 40 miles away, but the only one of the chain's bookstores here closed this month. No national grocery chain operates a store here.
The city's 22.8% unemployment rate is among the highest in the U.S.; 30% of residents are on food stamps.
"As the city loses so much, the tax base shrinks and the city has to cut back services," said Margaret Dewar, a professor of urban planning at the University of Michigan. That causes such hassles for retailers as longer police-response times, as well as less-frequent snow plowing and trash pickup.
A city devoid of retail chains, people left without groceries, malls and bookstores. All that remains are the dollar stores. And no tax base either. The cycle feeds itself and it's going nationwide. When enough businesses close and enough jobs are lost, the entire system begins to implode. The government can keep spending money for some time, businesses can't.
The Obama administration's plan to bulldoze portions of major American cities in order to centralize them further, will reduce the ghost town effect and the standard of living and potential for economic recovery. Environmentalists will be pleased to see the hive effect in action, and the pesky suburbs, which people used to try and escape dysfunctional urban city management, rolled up; no one else will be.
Meanwhile the partially government subsidized housing market will both make it easier for the government to control where people live and remove the "market" part of the housing market. Government intervention in the housing market created the current economic crisis. Meanwhile government regulation will help create a wide gap between government subsidized housing and independent home ownership, a gap further widened by growing property taxes from cities and communities whose budgets have been widened by stimulus funds that have run out. That same gap can already be seen in many major American cities and bedroom communities
The paradoxical result is that more people will have houses, but fewer people will be able to have any real mobility, both physical and social. This social reengineering of American life will leverage government control of housing to recreate the worst Soviet experiments in artificial neighborhoods and cities.
Consumer choices will drastically decline, individual options will be limited, but people will be able to take comfort in knowing that their choices and options are determined by a higher authority somewhere in Washington D.C. There will be housing, but it will be government subsidized housing. There will be stores, but their prices will be artificially set and unions will play a large part in owning and running them. There will be businesses, but they will be cottage industries subsidized by the government and dependent on foreign workers and imports.
American business, industry and the free market will be dead in Obama's Post-Capitalist America.
The question becomes, why kill business? Government spending depends on the golden egg of taxation that comes from the goose of commerce. Throttle the goose, and where will the golden eggs come from?
That is a reasonable question, but the same people ready to run up a 10 trillion dollar deficit built on debt to China are not the people you should expect reasonable thought from. The socialist drive all along has been to reconstruct society and centralize it through government. Asking the same people who think Cuba represents a successful revolutionary experiment about finance is like asking a morbid alcoholic who will pay for the whiskey when he gets fired from his job.
Socialism is about social control. Capitalism is a key obstruction toward that end. It was the rise of the merchant and the accompanying middle class that helped bring an end to the nobility and monarchies of Europe. The American Revolution was driven by the wish of free people to keep their economic independence from an outdated centralized monarchy that was out of touch with their needs and realities.
The free market allows people to be independent of government, it allows for the "American Dream" of social mobility, aspiration and freedom. It permits people to work their way up, build a better life for their children and go from the "huddled masses" of Emma Lazarus' poem, to leading comfortable independent lives in the middle class.
That same middle class which the left has always hated and roared against. Because the bourgeois represents something very dangerous for would be tyrants, personal independence. That is why tyrants must seize control of a country's economy, smother it outright or distribute it among their friends who will then turn into a bribe factory, as is the case under Russia's Putin.
A free economy means freedom. All tyrants know this. Obama knows this. It is why socialism and the free market have been such intractable enemies. The free market is a knife at the throat of tyranny. And socialism is a knife at the throat of the free market.
Destroying the "American Dream"
Destroying the "American Dream" of financial success and personal freedom, is the only way that the left can take over the United States... and replace it with their own "Soviet Dream" of centralized government control, enforced social justice and power to the commissars\community organizers.
Obama's Post-Capitalist America is meant to be the triumph of socialism, and the emergence of a new America that will have nothing in common with the old except a handful of totems and icons, a flag, a 4th of July fireworks display and a name. To get there, America is to be plunged into poverty and misery, its businesses are to be destroyed, corrupted through regulation into socialist entities or nationalized outright. Its citizens are to be goaded with an endless barrage of propaganda into a state of numb mindlessness and its institutions are to be taken over, just as the barbarians seized Rome.
That is what we are seeing now in Obama's War on America, a war he is fighting by attacking the American Dream. Knowing that to kill a nation's dreams is also to kill its soul.
