Months ago, conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh said
he hoped that President Barack Obama would fail. There was great buzz and hand
wringing from the left-liberal segment of the media as if they had never wished
failure of Mr. Obama’s predecessor, President George W. Bush.
There
were, and remain, many ways to view Mr. Limbaugh’s comment. One view is to
think he meant that he hoped the president would fail in his attempt to sell
his policies to Congress and the American people.
To
think the American public wouldn’t buy the liberal agenda was faulty since the
Democrat won the election by a sizeable margin of victory and the bulk of the
voting public was put off after eight years of a Republican administration that
had brought the economy almost to its knees. Remember, the bailouts started
during the Bush administration with even Republican candidate John McCain
voting for them.
And
to think that Congress wouldn’t accept the policies was also faulty since the
Democrats had control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate.
There
is another way to view the comment. That view indicates that Mr. Limbaugh
actually thought President Obama’s policies, as anti free market as they are,
could actually succeed in getting the United States out of the fiscal mess we
find ourselves, a mess the country has been in for generations. His comment
reflects his own lack of certainty that the free market is superior to statist
controls, be they deemed socialist or fascist, though the names are meaningless
at this point.
And
this interpretation, if accurate, is most disturbing because it indicates why,
as others have said in the past, that the conservatives have failed in their
attempts to maintain a free market, that they have caved in to the rhetoric of
the left and failed to understand the morality and legitimacy of liberty.
We’re
not talking about rank and file Republicans here, rather the elected and party
officials who abandoned the free market and liberty for the sake of winning
elections.
Sheldon Richman, a senior
fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation, wrote in April, “the
best chance for freedom, prosperity, and peace is through a radical
retrenchment of government at all levels and a full flowering of the free
market.”
Consider that most of what government operates is broke, the
Post Office, Medicare, Medicaid and Amtrak just to name a few. Social security
makes Bernie Madoff look like a piker.
All that government has to sustain its statist policies is
force, the powers to tax and to incarcerate. In short, it’s the power of the
gun. And this is the case no matter which party controls that power.
The good news is that people are beginning to wake up to
this fact. While the liberals
ridiculed the Tea Party events this spring, the attitude those events
expressed–that government needs to get out of the private lives of individual
men and women–isn’t going away. That attitude is, in fact growing and being
adopted by the small remaining libertarian faction within the Republican Party.
Perhaps some light will finally shine where the country needs
it most.
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