by Daniel Kish
President Obama has been seeing off loyal retainers from his first term, and recently he bid adieu to Steven Chu, his in-house Nobel Laureate and secretary of energy. In doing so, the president praised Mr. Chu
for “designing a cap to plug a hole in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico
when nobody else could figure it out.” This was in reference to the
2010 BP oil spill known as “Deepwater Horizon.” The problem is, Mr. Chu did not design the containment cap; the hardworking engineers of BP
and its private sector contractors did that, working night and day from
the moment of the disaster. Any energy business that had expertise
offered to help, and many did.
Mr. Chu
is a brilliant man and has done the world a service by his work in
optical physics, including his Nobel prize work involving light and
atoms. Still, Mr. Obama giving him credit for the cap fits perfectly
with the central conceit of liberalism in general, and the dangerous
path down which Mr. Obama is leading the nation.
When
the president shouted out, “You did not build that” during the latest
campaign, he was echoing a central tenet of the liberal credo:
Government — not free citizens or the businesses or works they create —
is responsible for the progress that Americans have achieved over the
last two centuries. Government can set and enforce rules that enable
individuals and businesses to take risks, innovate, invest, succeed and
fail. Yet government itself does not build or create wealth; even those
things it does build only come from revenues it coercively takes from
individuals and businesses to be spent on what politicians deem popular
at the moment.
At every turn, , however, the
president and his minions never miss an opportunity or a crisis to
convince Americans that it is government that will take care of, comfort
and embrace them. That suffocating embrace is now a
multi-trillion-dollar debt that will crush our children and their
children. Moreover, a growing segment of the population has suspended
disbelief to conclude that somehow, some way, the promises of
politicians will take care of them. We simply cannot afford the
president’s affection, something he is working hard with other people’s
money and effort to try to build.
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