Obama and Young People

Why don't young people see through Obama's "we are all in this together" riff?

What Obama really means is that he wants to force all the young people to pay for benefits to be delivered to various special interest groups of Mr Obama's choosing.

Case in point: Obamacare. The mandate will force the young and healthy to pay higher insurance premiums to subsidize care for the sick and old. How is this different from the 1960's, when Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon forced our young people to serve and die in Vietnam to benefit the rest of the citizenry?

Obama pretends that he is concerned about our children and grandchildren. Please, Mr Obama. No one in this world is more concerned about my children than I am. And what I see is you and the Democrats loading them up with a mountain of debt that will crush them for the rest of their lives.

When will the protests break out? When will the marches be led through the streets? When are our young people going to wake up to the fact that the man they naively support with such effervescent enthusiasm is giving them a screwing for the ages?

Obama and Social Darwinism

Recently, President Obama criticised Republicans for espousing "thinly veiled Social Darwinism."

I have worked as a software engineer in Silicon Valley for 30 years and I have yet to hear someone say: "The software module produced by this team is inefficient and buggy. Nevertheless, we should continue to employ the people on this team because it is our social responsibility to protect their jobs." More likely someone would say: "We should show these people the door as quickly as possible before they put us out of business."

The software industry is ultra-competitive. Call it Social Darwinism if you will, but the fact is: the best software wins. That is what keeps the software industry so vibrant.

When President Obama criticizes Social Darwinism, what he is saying in effect is: "We don't want our American companies to be subjected to the tempering and toughening forces of the global marketplace. We don't want them to be the most robust, vital companies they can be. We want our businesses to achieve social goals, not business goals."

The problem is: as soon as businesses start to direct their energies towards achieving social goals instead of business goals, they start to lose their ability to compete. Less competitive businesses eventually go bankrupt, and the jobs of all their employees are lost.

So, to the extent that Obama seeks to inhibit the operation of the forces of Social Darwinism, he is actually degrading the quality of American businesses, bringing about higher levels of unemployment in the United States, and driving jobs overseas.

Every software engineer in Silicon Valley grasps this intuitively. Obama, the community organizer, hasn't a clue.

Heaven help us

I just read Paul Krugman's column Jobs, Jobs and Cars. A more misinformed piece of economic writing I have rarely read.

The basic argument of the column is that jobs are not created by entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, but by actions like President Obama's bailout of the automobile industry.

Krugman writes:

The point is that successful companies — or, at any rate, companies that make a large contribution to a nation’s economy — don’t exist in isolation. Prosperity depends on the synergy between companies, on the cluster, not the individual entrepreneur. But the current Republican worldview has no room for such considerations. From the G.O.P.’s perspective, it’s all about the heroic entrepreneur, the John Galt, I mean Steve Jobs-type “job creator.”

When speaking of "clusters" or "synergy," might Krugman be referring to places like Silicon Valley? But how is it possible to argue that Silicon Valley would exist if it were not for entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs?

Mr Krugman writes:

Apple ... indirectly employ[s] around 700,000 people in its various suppliers. Unfortunately, almost none of those people are in America.

While it is true that most of the people employed by Apple's suppliers live outside the United States, one could also argue, not implausibly, that the entire Silicon Valley personal computer industry was created when Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak created the first Apple computer, so that the existence of the entire Silicon Valley personal computer industry (along with its many thousands of jobs) is dependent on the actions of these two entrepreneurs. All of the personal computer hardware and software companies that exist in Silicon Valley today, it could be argued, trace their lineage directly or indirectly to the actions of these two men. Now, to argue thus would, of course, be an exaggeration and completely unfair to the many, many other entrepreneurs who have contributed to the personal computer industry. But, the point is that one of the characteristic features of the Silicon Valley personal computer industry, and of the Silicon Valley high-tech industry in general, is that it has been dependent on the efforts of a handful of individual entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs created the cluster of high-tech industry that is known as Silicon Valley.

But let us ask ourselves an additional question: Where would California be without the Silicon Valley high-tech industry? Silicon Valley high-tech seems to be the only part of the California economy that is booming these days. Furthermore, it is simply not possible to imagine the modern State of California without the tax revenues that pour into the state government from capital gains earned by highly successful entrepreneurs living and working in Silicon Valley.

So, what exactly does Krugman mean when he suggests that President Obama's bailout of the auto industry is preferable to an economy based on "heroic entrepreneurs?" Does he mean that he would like to see the economy of Michigan substituted for the economy of California?

Heaven help us from Krugman's Nostalgianomics!

Obama, Obamacare, and Judicial Activism

Obama made an extraordinary statement yesterday. He said: if the Supreme Court were to overturn Obamacare, it would be "extraordinary" and “unprecedented” and an act of “judicial activism.”

The very function of the Supreme Court as a branch of the government is to overturn laws that a majority of the Justices find inconsistent with the Constitution. That this is the function of the Supreme Court was established by Marbury vs. Madison:

It is emphatically the province and duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is. Those who apply the rule to particular cases must, of necessity, expound and interpret that rule. If two laws conflict with each other, the Courts must decide on the operation of each.

So, if a law be in opposition to the Constitution, if both the law and the Constitution apply to a particular case, so that the Court must either decide that case conformably to the law, disregarding the Constitution, or conformably to the Constitution, disregarding the law, the Court must determine which of these conflicting rules governs the case. This is of the very essence of judicial duty.

If, then, the Courts are to regard the Constitution, and the Constitution is superior to any ordinary act of the Legislature, the Constitution, and not such ordinary act, must govern the case to which they both apply....

The Supreme Court overturns laws every year. If it did not overturn laws, there would be no need for its existence. We are left with the President of the United States, himself a former professor of constitutional law, making the statement that the Supreme Court, functioning in its normal role, is behaving in an extraordinary, unprecedented manner and engaging in judicial activism.

This is either ignorance or revolution.