"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety" --- Ben Franklin, 1775

If one paid close attention to President Obama's speech to Congress on February 25th of this year it should be abundantly clear that to him government is the answer to all social woes.

In a recent article for Real Clear Politics Robert Tracinski makes a number of points outlining Obama's plans for America as stated in his Address to Congress:

1. Taxes and regulations will increase.
2. The government will take over lending directly for many of the loans currently provided by the banking industry and indirectly by increasing federal regulations targeting banks and other lenders.
3. The government will continue to vilify and punish bankers.
4. No one will know when all of this intervention is going to end or how much bigger it is going to get.
5. Obama will subsidize inefficient and unprofitable "renewable energy" projects whose production levels are more limited than coal-fired or nuclear sources.
6. Obama will artificially increase the costs of all other forms of energy through a market-based cap on carbon pollutions that will not make wind and solar less expensive, but the other forms more expensive.
7. He will seek to impose socialized medicine that will include government restrictions (rationing) on what kinds care of medical practitioners are allowed to provide.
8. He will "soak the rich" (resulting in effective punishment for the more productive, considering that the top 1% of taxpayers currently provides nearly 40% of all federal income taxes).

All of this appears to mirror FDR's disastrous economic policies resulting in ten years of "economic collapse", but whose rhetoric enthralled the American public.

Considering that Obama's history contains lots of campaigning for high offices but remarkably little tenure in the same, it is not surprising that his plans for governing depend mostly on leftist Democratic boilerplate and provide little or nothing in the way of new approaches or "change".

His "stimulus bill" - actually created by House and Senate Democrats - is no more than a vehicle for his stated purpose (during his campaign) of imposing the "redistribution of wealth" - in this case transfers that favor those who owe rather than those who have saved. And the question still looms large; where are these trillions of dollars in deficit spending going to come from?

After all, money shoveled from Washington into the coffers of state capitals to help retain government positions (an undisclosed percentage of the "millions of jobs saved and created") is different from money actually entering the private economy and creating jobs.

The rush to socialism - or perhaps the "social democracy" practiced by many European governments and much admired by the American Left - has indeed begun.

This is a President who ignores history or revises it to serve his own purposes ("America invented the automobile", from his speech before Congress on 2/25)

For many of his post-collegiate years Obama embraced the adversarial mentality of "us versus them", relying upon "the man" or some other vague authoritarian figure to provide a target upon which to direct the blame for society's ills. Now he is the titular head of "them".

All of this bodes ill for those of us who prefer a diminished role for government in our daily lives, who value self-reliance, enjoying the challenge of a free market economy rather than relying upon the largess of a restrictive and intrusive government.

I would argue that the price for the "safety net" that this new President is gathering to cast over America will prove to be a dear one to pay for those who value the unique freedom that our country has flourished under.

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