This and That. Still Catching Up.

Thomas Sowell had a great article yesterday at American Thinker entitled New Heroes vs Old. I can remember a time when Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and John D. Rockefeller were regarded as heroes. Many such heroes were lionized by popular culture for their contributions to the well being of their fellow men. Sowell:

Henry Ford's mass production methods cut in half the cost of producing the famous Model T Ford in just five years. People who had once lived their entire lives within a narrow radius of a relatively few miles could now go see places they never knew about before. The automobile expanded their horizons.

People today who complain about the automobile's pollution have no idea how much more pollution there was before the automobile came along. In New York City, for example, the 40,000 horses that were the backbone of the city's transportation, before the automobile, produced 400 tons of manure per working day, along with 20,000 gallons of urine.

Today what we hear is a constant drum beat of how these evil rich people exploited the poor, ravaged the land, calling up images of viking raiders raping and pillaging. Yes, I suppose there was some of that, but I suspect there was a lot less of this behavior than you might think. Some of it too was born of ignorance, as people didn't always know the damage they were doing to the land in strip mining for instance.  In any case, we should be grateful to these men who have made our lives better. We should also be grateful to God who sent such men, with these ambitions and talents, to make life better for all of us.  Instead, we have a bunch of pampered children who have never had to live with hardship moaning and groaning about what their fathers did.
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Obama, in his SOTU speech said that we should "invest" (code word for Government spending) in all sorts of things.  One of those things was $1 Billion for research and development of new drugs.  Now, didn't the drug companies themselves used to do R&D for new drugs?  Indeed, wasn't the United States the leading country for R&D of new drugs?  Shouldn't those who stand to make money from a product invest in the R&D to bring that product to market?  Thomas Edison certainly did.  That is the traditional approach in a free market economy.  But Mr. Obama finds that distasteful.  Instead, what Obama is doing is creating conditions so hostile to free enterprise that companies, realizing there is no money to be made, are abandoning the field. Then Obama comes riding in on the white horse, announcing that the free market has failed, so government should make these "investments." Of course, the free market didn't fail, it was strangled.  John F. DiLeo outlines just some of the ways that Obama is doing this in an article in the American Thinker today entitled Obama's Dangerous Export Inititative.

What Mr. Obama is doing has been called many things: crony capitalism, a thugocracy.  It is all of those things, but it most resembles Fascism.  The Government gets to set the agenda, and tell companies what to do, and as long as they do it, they get to make a little money.  It is not, however, a free market.  The upside for politicians in this system is that they can claim credit for whatever goes right, and can lay blame on the (not so) free market for any failures.  But in the process, they will have enslaved us all.