Obama and the virtue of selfishness

Writer Michael P. Tremoglie writing for The Bulletin earlier this week wrote a prescient piece titled, “Obama: Taxpayers Are Selfish.” He was recalling an event Barack Obama spoke at last Thursday in Sarasota, Fla., expressing his intent after he becomes president to change the tax code to help the economy. How would he achieve this?

“John McCain and Sarah Palin call (the tax increase) socialistic. I don’t know when they decided they wanted to make a virtue out of selfishness,” Obama said.

Despite Obama’s Occidental, Columbia and Harvard pedigree, on economics he is totally devoted to and blinded by the Marxist propaganda he learned at those schools. Why? Because he studied at quintessential liberal academies where the lectures by his professors were less invitations to submit worthy opinions to the arena of ideas and more of an indoctrination factory.

I have never met people like Michelle and Barack Obama; persons who have in a Manchurian Candidate fashion accepted the Marxist socialist propaganda from their professors entirely without question. That’s why Obama says what he says about economics. He actually believes that economic Marxism is the best way to go despite our 40 year Cold War with the old Soviet empire where America valiantly fought against Marxist and socialist ideas here and throughout the world, which were responsible for the ghastly deaths of over 100 million people since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.

Obama’s characterization of a tax cut as selfishness in a revealing way seeks to justify both his socialist intent (taking money from producers and giving it to non-producers) as well as denigrating McCain and Palin’s belief in laissez-faire capitalism out of the school of Ronald Reagan, Thomas Sowell, Milton Friedman and Adam Smith.

How will Obama the Messiah accomplish this feat?

Obama plans to raise taxes only on the top 5 percent of America’s taxpayers. In his tax scheme, he calls these people “the rich” – families that make over $250,000 per year. However, this number has been questioned by a growing number of political pundits and economic experts as essentially untenable; therefore, Biden and Obama for the past three weeks have been back tracking on his “tax the rich” economic stimulus package.

Here is what Tremoglie wrote:

Mr. Obama said initially that only those who earn more than $250,000 per year would be seeing their taxes increase and those making less than $200,000 would have them cut. But his running mate, Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., said recently that the tax cut would go only to people making $150,000 per year. Another Obama supporter, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, said the tax cut would apply to only families making less than $120,000.

This is typical Big Government doublespeak from Obama straight out of George Orwell’s anti-totalitarian novel, “1984.” Obama realizes that the liberal media have been in the tank for him since he first entered the presidential race and has skillfully played the race card when it suits him. Furthermore, by exploiting liberal identity politics, the old media even sacrificed the white woman candidate (Hillary Clinton) in favor of the black man candidate (Obama).

When people point out Obama’s daily inconsistencies on economics, public policy, executive power, Congress, education, his past associates, foreign affairs, the United Nations, it is all covered up, or the liberal pundits in the mainstream media like Hitler’s Goebbels or the old Soviet newspaper “Pravda” run interference as Obama’s ministers of propaganda, raising outrageous allegations like: “racism,” “divisive politics,” “trying to keep the black man down” or in the words of Michelle: “Republicans are trying to tear people apart, but Barack is trying to bring people together.”

Obama’s recent criticism of Republicans’ desire to keep taxes low as wanting to “make a virtue out of selfishness” is a perversion of the objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand and her 1964 book “The Virtue of Selfishness,” which was Rand’s singular critique against socialism and for capitalism.

Since FDR and LBJ and the apotheosis of Big Government liberalism in the 1930s and ’60s, “selfishness” has become a dirty word. A better title for Ayn Rand’s book would have been “The Virtue of Self-interest.” Self-interest is what made America in just 230 years arise from being a backwater colony of England to the world’s sole superpower in the 21st century – the mightiest nation in the history of humanity.

How did America achieve such greatness over other countries like France, England, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Russia, China, India, Africa, Iran, Iraq and other nations that existed for hundreds or even thousands of years? By doing the very things Obama says we shouldn’t do – promoting free market reforms, rugged American individualism, hard work, saving money, living within one’s means, investing in your family, starting businesses, employing people, paying your tithes and in short: maximizing your God-given talents for the benefit of God, yourself and humanity without excessive government taxation, bureaucratic interference and class-warfare policies rooted in Marxism.

In conclusion, Ayn Rand’s objectivist philosophy says that, “It is one’s own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns and derives from love.” Selfishness, or self-interest, is a good thing. Only unscrupulous politicians like Obama, Biden, Pelosi, Harry Reid and the Democratic Party want you to believe that keeping more of your own money to help your family is a bad thing – Ridiculous!

Obama and other Marxists, socialists and progressives create self-perpetuating policies that are designed to increase their power by making people dependent on the god-State forever. In the words of Ayn Rand, socialism amounts to: “The man who is willing to serve as the means to the ends of others, will necessarily regard others as the means to his ends.”

If Obama, Pelosi and Reid are successful at plunging America into the abyss of socialism and in resurrecting the welfare state of FDR and LBJ, the tragic results will be that over time fewer and fewer people that can work will predictably choose not do so, but will do like their neighbors and suckle from the teat of Leviathan government.

If liberals achieve Wilson, FDR and LBJ’s dream of murdering the last vestiges of American individualism and exceptionalism, America will become like socialist Europe, and what the Soviet Union could not accomplish in 40 years of fighting a protracted Cold War with America, Obama the Marxist, with his majorities in both houses of Congress, will accomplish in four years – THE UNITED NATIONS OF AMERICA!
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