Video: McCain gets it right in Toledo

posted at 8:30 am on October 20, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
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If John McCain manages to win this election, he should thank Joe Wurzelbacher for doing what McCain’s campaign couldn’t do: straighten out his economic message. In Toledo, McCain finally gave the correct analysis of the Barack Obama approach to free enterprise. First, though, McCain defended Wurzelbacher from the avalanche of attacks he has received, and put them in their proper perspective:

The reason why Joe won is because he’s the only person to get a real answer out of Senator Obama about his plans for our country. I think you all know very well that Joe didn’t ask for Senator Obama to come to his house. Joe certainly didn’t ask to be famous. He certainly didn’t ask for the political attacks on him from the Obama campaign.

Joe, if you’re watching, I’m sorry you’re being put through this. No American should be attacked for asking questions of a presidential candidate. No one.

We learned more about Senator Obama’s plans from Joe’s question than we’ve learned in months of speeches by Senator Obama. Joe has now reminded us all that we didn’t become the greatest nation on Earth by giving our money to the government to “spread the wealth around”. In this country, we believe in spreading opportunity for those who need jobs and those who create them.

That is the formula that answers Obama, and McCain never really discovered it until Joe the Plumber made it obvious.  The strength in the American economy comes from the private sector, not from welfare programs.  While Joe Biden and Obama talk about reconstituting the Works Projects Administration, Joe and the rest of the taxpayers would like to hang onto the wealth they create and spread it around as they see fit, not as some bureaucrats in Washington would like — after taking a healthy share of it for themselves.

Government has a role in protecting opportunity, but not in dictating results.  The former is wise governance of a free market, and the latter is socialism.  It presumes that property belongs to the government first, not to those who own it, and that government has the right to transfer property to whomever they select as stewards of it.

No one hoards money in mattresses any longer.  When people make more money, they either invest it or they spend it.  In both cases, it “spreads the wealth” in the manner chosen by the owner of that wealth, without any of the massive cost burden of filtering it through Washington bureaucracies.  That’s much more effective at building an economy than capital confiscation and redistributionism.  How do we know this?  The latter has failed in every instance it has been tried, and the former has served America well for over two centuries.

If McCain wants to win this election, he needs to stop talking about almost everything else and focus on this message.  The same impulse to “spread the wealth around” through government redirection of capital is what caused Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to collapse, and government to grow into the behemoth it has become.  The more McCain makes that case, the closer he will come to shocking the world on November 4th.

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