Wrong Rights and Real Bubbles

"Who's the more foolish? The fool, or the fool that follows him?"
--Obi-Wan Kenobi (Star Wars)

This president has made some laughable comments, but some recent ones are among his most ludicrous. He appears to be engaging in the classic propaganda tactic of linking terms that garner people's sympathies with wrong meanings in hope that, over time, people will reassign the wrong meaning to the term.

For example, in his weekly radio address last weekend that featured comments on his floundering Affordable Care Act, he proclaimed that "in the United States of America, health insurance isn't a privilege - it is your right."

Correctly defined, a right is something that simultaneously exists among all people and imposes no obligation on another - except that of non-interference. Americans are particularly sympathetic to the concept of rights through the writings of Jefferson and others who observed that rights come from our Creators or from nature rather than from government, and that government cannot legitimately revoke these rights (i.e., they are inalienable).

The 'right' that the president speaks of is not a right but indeed a privilege - a privilege that only government can provide by forcibly take resources from some for the benefit of others. People are treated unequally under the law in order to achieve some faction's vision of equally of condition. There is nothing natural or durable about this privilege as it could, as the president correctly observed in his speech, be revoked by a different regime that manages to get control of government's strong arm.

The president has also been voicing concern about financial bubbles in his recent speeches. On the surface, this is commendable. Once again, however, he appears to be appealing to people's capacity for fast rather than slow thinking in order to push an agenda.

For example, in a recent speech, he noted, "When wealth concentrates at the very top, it can inflate unstable bubbles that threaten the economy." He coupled this with comments that narrowing the gap between rich and poor is "my highest priority."

As these pages have observed many times, income inequality, while being an essential feature of a thriving economic system, is driven to unnatural extremes by interventionary policy. This president has overseen policies that have widened, not narrowed, the divide.

Concentration of wealth does not inflate financial bubbles. But wealth can become more concentrated as a consequence of government policies that do blow bubble.

Mr Obama is presiding over policies that are and always have been at the root of bubble creation.

This president wants you to believe that he opposes financial bubbles and income disparity while in reality he has been a major architect of both.