OBAMA’S “NEIGHBORLY” SOCIALISM

[Get the latest “Truth With Speedzzter” here]

When Barack Obama’s multipart jousting with independent center-right talk show host Bill O’Reilly on Fox News Channel touched on Obama’s liberal “Robin Hood” tax increase plan, O’Reilly charged that the plan is socialist income redistribution. Obama countered that it’s “neighborly” for someone who is financially secure to give up part of their income to “a waitress” who is struggling.

BIG GOVERNMENT AS “NEIGHBOR?”

Barack Obama’s conception of being “neighborly” boils down to taking by force of law the hard-earned cash from those whom the Government determines don’t really need it (without any particularized analysis of need), laundering it through a huge, inefficient bureaucracy, and then paying a fraction of it to those who did nothing to earn it as an entitlement.

Some neighbor.

Being a neighbor used to mean voluntary association with those who lived near to you. “Neighborly” once meant “Appropriate to the relation of neighbors; friendly.”

Old-fashioned neighborliness involved personal interactions and personal decisions to help individuals we personally identified as being in temporary need.


The honest recipients of neighborly generosity have no sense of entitlement. Only gratitude for receipt of help that was freely given under the color of grace and friendship.

Neighborliness used to mean a personal relationship.

But in Barack Obama’s liberal world, “neighborly” means taking that money a small business person has set aside for investing in new tools and equipment or to hire additional employees and giving it by force over to some stranger who did nothing to deserve it.

“Neighborly” in Obama-speak means forcing grieving families to liquidate their family businesses upon the death of their industrious matriarchs or patriarchs to share the assets with a thirsty federal bureaucracy and a group of underachieving strangers.

“Neighborly” in Obama’s socialist mind amounts to subsidizing a huge class of permanent adolescents with an “allowance” from their big federal “mama,” paid for by those workers and investors who already shoulder the vast majority of the cost for our bloated government.

Barack Obama, the self-proclaimed agent of “Change” (who incidentally votes the Democrat party line 97% of the time) certainly has a distorted concept of what it means to be “neighborly.” And apparently, April 15 is the most “neighborly” day of the year among the covetous Obama-ians.

Undoubtedly Barack Obama’s ideas for a super-sized federal government as “neighbor” are derived from the lessons of Chicago-Style machine politics and filtered through the liberal United Church of Christ social gospel Obama heard for years from the radical Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

The Chicago machine traditionally followed the Tammany Hall model of “spreading the graft” around to those who “need” it in order to buy the votes necessary to stay in power.

Tammany Hall bosses (we could call them “community organizers” in today’s politically correct vernacular) organized and policed immigrant communities, secured patronage jobs for the truly “deserving,” and even parceled out valuable goods and services. All these community organizing “bosses” wanted in return was unquestioned loyalty on election day.

Liberals in the Twentieth Century institutionalized and partially nationalized this “Robin Hood” model in the modern, urban welfare state. Instead of building a system that encouraged and rewarded personal responsibility, delayed gratification, self-sacrifice to get ahead, and personal industry, the big urban political machines created a system of dependency, patronage and public subsidy of irresponsible behavior.

Obama’s vaunted “community organizer” experience was based on facilitating this urban liberal redistributionist model.

Obama’s chosen Christian denomination, the United Church of Christ, claims:

Jesus was a low-wage worker, just like too many workers in the U.S. today. Nurses aides, hotel housekeepers, farm workers, day laborers, early childcare specialists, fast food workers, retail sales clerks, and custodians are examples of workers who provide needed services but who usually receive wages so low that they cannot keep a family out of poverty.

However, instead of encouraging people to turn off the TV, put down the bottle and the crack pipe, train and study hard, delay unnecessary luxuries, discipline themselves, and work their way out of entry-level jobs into something better, Obama’s liberal United Church of Christ favors discarding any pretense of personal industry and the free market for labor by replacing it with big government programs to make such low skill, entry-level jobs financially attractive as life-long careers.

In other words, they want forced conscription of money from those who have earned it and redistribution to those whom the free market says haven’t.

Already, the bottom fifty percent of taxpayers pay less than three percent of tax revenues. But exempting these folks from government-coerced “neighborliness” isn’t enough. Obama, according to the sparing with O’Reilly, wants to send millions of these people an unearned check.

Apparently these “gift” recipients don’t need the “civic pride” of supporting the federal system, except as greedy parasites.

Who pays for this?

America’s small businesses, ranches and farms. America’s entrepreneurs. America’s hard-working professionals. America’s risk-taking investors. America’s wealth creators.

In other words, the same people who already fund over three-quarters of the federal government.

Ultimately, these government-imposed costs of doing business are passed on to the middle class in the form of higher prices, reduced service and reduced quality.

And by some estimates, Obama’s tax increase could be as much as one trillion dollars too small to fund the grandiose plans he has for our new national “neighborhood.”

The left often decries the dangers of “theocracy.” Indeed, fifty-five liberal preachers, mostly from Obama’s own left-wing United Church of Christ, have filed a complaint with the Internal Revenue Service to threaten and coerce conservatives from speaking out on moral issues from the pulpit. Ostensibly, this anti-First Amendment hectoring is aimed at preventing the morality of traditional Christianity from influencing secular politics.

But the very same left seeks to enforce some sort of “brothers’s keeper” “neighborliness” with other people’s money. And the very same United Church of Christ denomination has at times welcomed Barack Obama into the pulpits of their churches to spread his partisan message of wealth redistribution and big government.

Pardon some taxpayers if they would expect a “theocracy” would be better and more fair than Obama-mania. Under the biblical legal system, only a tenth of one’s income was payable as “the tithe.” Under Obama’s dream, some taxpayers will be forced to split the results of their labors fifty/fifty with an insatiable government.

Is taking half of someone’s money “neighborly?”

Or is it just plain, old-fashioned socialism.

The voters in November will make the call.