Anthony Martin at the Conservative Examiner has described the Obama Plan for the systematic removal of our remaining American liberties — brick by brick. Each step is intimately connected with the operation of the free market.
During the presidential election, the free market itself was blamed for the financial crisis that our nation faced. (The idea that a government regulated money supply, semi-coerced loans to home buyers with poor credt, and a growing mountain of public debt might have something to do with the financial crisis was never seriously considered by Obama or his supporters.)
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Then the federal government began to deprive private enterprise of the power to compensate its employees as the business owners thought fit, making corporate executives more like middle-level civil servants. (Compensation at the lower end of the pay spectrum has long been subject to heavy-handed federal invention through the National Labor Relations Board and federal laws like the Fair Labor Standards Act.)
Next, the Obama Plan effectively nationalized the auto industry, following the path of the Bolsheviks, the Fascists, the Nazis, and other totalitarian systems. Obama might have offered relief to the auto industry in other forms: relaxed environmental regulations on automobiles, reducing overly burdensome OSHA (Occupation Safety and Health Administration) standards, ending the federally mandated requirement for “collective bargaining” and so forth — but the goal is not to help the auto industry, Martin suggests, but to capture the auto industry.
Controlling our healthcare industry, with the implicit power to virtually decide who lives and who dies in medical care, was the fourth brick, Martin writes. The improvement of healthcare was not the issue: America has the best healthcare system in the world. Right now many Britons view that nation’s sad descent into socialized medicine as a failure — just the sort of failure that President Obama wants for America. Making things better for us was not the objective: seizing power, always, was the goal, Anthony Martin observes.
Finance “reform,” the fifth brick, removes the privacy on financial transactions, down to ordinary credit card purchases, which allows us to conduct business without federal bureaucrats watching every move. Ominously, all sales of gold over $600 (which means, really, all sales of gold) now have to be reported to the IRS. The federal government’s “need to know” our private affairs grows and grows and grows, just as our liberty shrinks.
Martin warns that the last brick that Obama is seeking to remove is our freedom of communication. NPR producers — folks funded with our tax dollars — share dreams of Rush Limbaugh dying with fellow travelers. Noises that Fox News should be shut down, the Internet regulated, and the Fairness Doctrine reintroduced are all different aspects of this last, final assault on our liberties.
