Shrum's Dream of Obama

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Bob Shrum’s newThe Week column nicely portrays how a Democratic stategist would like Obama’s budget to be seen: a Rooseveltian, Reaganesque revolution in American politics that would establishes state control over the energy economy and politically irreversible new entitlements under the guise of “rights”:

Obama’s new America will be very American, a reach for enduring values of equality, opportunity and economic justice. But it will also be very different.

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The big change, however, is that America will not only move from laggard to leader on climate change, Obama is proposing to leave behind the entrenched carbon-based economy and rely on American ingenuity—yes, Newt, financed by your disdained public sector—to create a cleaner, more self-sufficient economy and the “green” jobs of the 21st Century.

[...]

The 60 votes in the Senate will be found—or gotten around. And after 60 years of struggle, health care will finally be a right, not a privilege in America.

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The Pell Grant program, which offers scholarships to poor and middle class students, will no longer be an annual appropriation, subject to cuts; it will be an entitlement on the order of Social Security, with more than $5000 a year guaranteed to every eligible student. In all but name, this establishes a right to higher education.

So, to summarize, the pillars of the Obama revolution are: government control of the (green!) economy, socialized health care, and checks for young voters.

12 thoughts on “Shrum's Dream of Obama”

  1. As someone who's known engineers who rely on large dollops of funding for development of projects, the presumption that public sector cash will be enough to sustain any meaningful innovations with actual endpoints strains credulity. This money, if it is sufficient, will need to be siphoned from other private sources via taxes or other public private partnerships, and at its most nefarious could take the form of the monopolization of venture capital by the public sector for projects that meet certain (“green”) conditions. This is a surefire way to make flesh what Tocqueville called the soft tyranny of bureaucracy, which even the most original and energetic minds cannot penetrate. Slapping prerequisites onto innovation strikes me as one of the most regressive, backwards, disastrous policies to be formulated since forced sterilization. The fact that Obama and those around him would support this shows that he understands little about the very nature of the intellectual process behind innovation. It displays an academic insularity that truly frustrates me. “First class intellect”, my ass.

  2. Highly recommend “Is Health Care a Right?” by Andrew Busch in the current edition of the Claremont Review of Books. Discussion of Rawls to boot.

  3. I am ambivalent about the idea of vouchered higher education. As a libertarian I think voucher school systems would go a long way in improving K-12 education and reducing cost. At the same time, people my age (early 20's) seem to get along just fine with a job, a cheap apartment, and a few classes. Could letting national vouchers in college systems be a stepping stone for vouchers in the lower grades and expanded privatization? or a stepping stone into a wasteful K-16 system, as the K-12 is today. I tend to think it would lead the the latter system and I would reject it (as nice as 5000 bucks sounds).

  4. Free money for everyone!

    I say we all sit at home and just let 'smart' black people named Obama do all the work.

  5. I totally agree with Cool Cal – Obama’s line of thinking on all this is typical of people who have spent their careers in the ivory tower or employed by the public. If he had even 5 years experience as an executive or owner of a business, I doubt he’s have such a deep-seated belief in government’s ability to promote innovation.

  6. I totally agree with Cool Cal – Obama’s line of thinking on all this is typical of people who have spent their careers in the ivory tower or employed by the public. If he had even 5 years experience as an executive or owner of a business, I doubt he’s have such a deep-seated belief in government’s ability to promote innovation.

  7. Can American voters and the people working for the mainstream media really be as stupid as they appear?

  10. So when Bob Shrum's vision of America is realized by Obama, a higher proportion of voters will be dependent on a vast network of coercion for their education, jobs and basic health care, and this will be accomplished in the name of both a principled moral ideal and pragmatism. The dissenters are clowns and liars, according to Shrum, and thus justifiably coercible. Thus Shrumocrats build a 'nation'. The contradictions will come home to roost, Shrum's fantasies notwithstanding.