The Real Danger

Obama's Sincerity

By Robert Ringer

Near the end of the last article in this series, I said: "To those who doubt Obama's ability to fake his way through eight months of scrutiny, I offer the words of supreme historian Will Durant: 'It may be true ... that "you can't fool all the people all the time," but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.'"

This past week, though, faking it got a lot more difficult for Chicago's Wizard of Words. And now that we've all recovered from getting a peep at what's under Barack Obama's robe, what does it all mean? Not a whole lot, really. It's just another morsel of evidence that exposes him as a devout Marxist.

But who needs more evidence? His mother's devotion to the worldwide communist movement is well documented. And Mad Mama Obama II (a.k.a. Michelle Obama) is having a devil of a time keeping her feelings to herself until inauguration day. Given what we already knew about Obama, the "kill-whitey!" rhetoric of his pal, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, is hardly earthshaking news.

True, all this could bring Obama down — either in the remaining primaries or in the general election, if he gets that far. But that could actually be bad news for the Republican wing of the Demopublican Party. Why? Because whoever ends up in the White House next January will inherit an America that cannot be fixed without inducing the kind of pain that is a catalyst for revolution.

Here's the one unspoken reality that no one wants to face up to — certainly no politician: It is impossible for America to right its financial ship so long as American workers are overpaid. How can I make such a blasphemous statement?

Because, in a truly free market, so long as there are workers in other countries who are willing to do the same jobs as Americans at a fraction of their wages, that means, by definition, that American workers are overpaid. It is a self-evident truth — a truth that guarantees American workers cannot continue to live like spoiled children.

Now tell me, do you really believe that any president is going to get on national television and tell Mr. and Mrs. America — just ten years away from retiring to a Florida golf club community — that they have to work harder and be prepared to dramatically lower their living standards?

The truth no one wants to hear is that whoever lands in the Oval Office next January cannot do much to stop America's free fall. As I've previously pointed out, Hillary would be a tad less lethal because she would spend most of her time hobnobbing with Washington's elite and New York's Upper East Side crowd. She worships power and its trappings, and, notwithstanding her "it takes a village" rhetoric, she has a deep-seated disdain for the lower echelons of society.

Not so, however, with Obama. On the contrary, I believe he is a sincere young man. So was Fidel Castro in his revolutionary days ... and Ho Chi Minh ... and Vladimir Lenin. Those men truly believed in remaking society in their own images by taking from "the rich" and giving to "the poor." (What a novel idea.)

By contrast, men like Josef Stalin, Kim Jong Il, and Hugo Chavez have used communism only as a mask to rule their countries with an iron fist. Such dictators are brutal, to be sure, but at least you know that they aren't sincere about wanting to help the "underprivileged."

Because Obama is a truly sincere revolutionary, he should be taken at his word. While he is superbly talented when it comes to talking with a lack of specificity, just those few things he has shared with the American public all but guarantee that the invisible depression we've been experiencing for decades will become very visible sooner rather than later.

But whether it's a sincere revolutionary like Obama or social- and power-conscious Hillary who ends up in the White House, Republicans should welcome their arrival. Because if John McCain manages to slip in — much like Richard Nixon did in 1968, just by hanging around until everyone else dropped out or got themselves killed — Republicans and capitalism are sure to be blamed for the carnage.

Since working-class Americans will not be willing to work harder and longer for much less pay, the only way out is inflation of our already decimated currency. And inflation encourages a free for all spirit among individuals and special interest groups whose aim is to get more from the government than their neighbors.

Legendary economist Henry Hazlitt put it rather bluntly when he pointed out that inflation fosters "the illusion in the great majority of voters that they will somehow get the better of the swindle, and profit at the expense of a few unidentified victims."

Now, for goodness sake, don't let anything I've said here cause you to lose any sleep. After all, I've been wrong more than once in my life. I virtually assured readers in the early eighties that runaway inflation was a near-term certainty. But, to my embarrassment, I was wrong — mostly because I failed to heed Harry Browne's words of wisdom.

What Harry said was that short-term predictions are tricky, because there are an infinite number of factors at play that can change or stall things dramatically. Take 9/11 or World War II, for example. Or the Korean War ... the Vietnam War ... the Gulf War ... the Iraq War. Hmm ... seems to be a bit of a pattern here for escaping economic reality.

Most important, Harry pointed out that the government has two lethal tools at its disposal — printing presses (which is often a metaphor for electronic currency entries) and the virtual unrestricted use of force. Do you think you could keep your failing enterprise from going under if you were allowed to print money and use force against your employees and creditors?

Today, however, I realize that there were a couple of other factors that forestalled what I viewed as inevitable runaway inflation in the early 1980s — factors that I don't recall Harry ever mentioning. And in Article XV of this series, I'll introduce those factors into the runaway-inflation equation.

Previous - Money XIII - "Change" and Dictatorship: The Great Depression

Next - Money XV - Judgment Day

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