The Necessary Enemy

posted at 5:39 pm on May 2, 2009 by Doctor Zero

Ed’s report on the threats Obama made recently, to use “public humiliation” against Chrysler bondholders if they resist his plans to manage the company’s debts, is appalling but unsurprising. Talk of turning the White House press corps into a weapon against recalcitrant executives is particularly chilling when it comes from someone who smiles upon the kind of “public humiliation” that involves busloads of angry “activists” camping out on your front lawn. Nice life you have there, Chrysler executive. It would be a shame if something bad were to happen to it.

Obama has developed a nasty habit of using aggressive tactics against private citizens. The AIG bonus debacle, with its threats of punishment by tax laws and angry mobs… banks forced to accept TARP money and federal controls, then told they would not be allowed to return the former or escape the latter… and an election campaign that featured Democrat officials abusing their power, to destroy an inconvenient private citizen, are among the lowlights. Obama’s background includes decades in a church whose pastor specialized in racist tirades, scapegoating whites for the problems of blacks, along with mentors who advocated “personalizing” political debates – and then destroying those persons. His behavior signifies more than just a young politician doing as he was taught, however, and it’s going to get worse.

Collectivist politics of any stripe requires enemies, because they rely upon coercion. Socialist utopias don’t come into existence spontaneously. There would be no need for confiscatory tax rates on the wealthy, if the wealthy voluntarily used their money to buy cars and houses for everyone in the lower income brackets, without requiring them to work in return. Nobody would be talking about nationalizing health care if doctors and hospital staff were happy to work eighty hour weeks for minimum wage, and pharmaceutical companies were run as giant charities that cheerfully sank billions into developing drugs they resell at cost. Few people would leave a sizable chunk of their estates to the government, if the government didn’t seize the money through death taxes. No large group of people on Earth has every freely chosen to peacefully organize themselves into a socialist collective – they either slip into it through small losses of freedom that seem relatively painless as they happen, or they are forced into it at gunpoint. If Franklin Delano Roosevelt had proposed Obama’s current budget and regulatory plans at the outset of the New Deal, he would have been laughed out of office, and if he had attempted to impose Obama’s policies by force, he would have needed infantry platoons and tanks.

The basic premise of socialist government, as Obama famously explained to a plumber in Ohio last fall, is to take wealth away from the more successful people in society, and “spread that wealth around.” This will always be a more attractive proposition to the people serving as the bread, than the people being used as the peanut butter. The creators of wealth must be forced to participate in the system, far beyond the point where a sense of civic duty or compassion for the downtrodden would keep them in line. After all, nearly half the country currently pays no income taxes, and they’re not all “downtrodden” people deserving of charity. In fact, the socialist dream is to reach the point where over half the population pays no taxes, and will thus be inclined to support all expansions of government power. You can’t get to the magic 51% of tax dependents just by using hungry orphans as props.

Increasing levels of coercion are necessary to expand the socialist system, and keep wealth producers trapped within it. To maintain popular support, the socialist needs voters to stay angry at designated class enemies. The Obama style of total government control over private businesses tends to turn feral with frightening speed, because it attempts to preserve the illusion of private enterprise, even as the “entrepreneurs” are enslaved to the total state. The employees and executives of Chrysler are not spoken of as government employees, and we still pretend that AIG is a “private corporation.” All those banks forced to accept TARP funds are still supposedly private companies, not official branches of the Treasury Department. This has the advantage of giving politicians a measure of distance from the fate of the corporations involved. When GM announced that it would be going bankrupt anyway, after billions of dollars in bailout money, not a single person in the Obama Administration resigned in disgrace, or was even reprimanded. When the subprime mortgage industry blew up, the politicians who designed the system and controlled Fannie Mae were able to mutter that the crisis was caused by “fat cats on Wall Street.” In fact, it is the official position of the Democrat Party that not one single member of the Party did anything wrong in the financial-sector crisis… and to the lasting cost of the American people, the Republican presidential candidate did not dispute this position.

To keep controlling, bleeding, and blaming those private corporations, the Democrats will need to keep threatening and demonizing them. They cannot afford to allow the voters to start wondering if the corporations are being treated unfairly, or asking why no politician ever seems to be at fault for anything that goes wrong with these government-controlled industries. The Party’s media allies will be happy to help them with this project. Can anyone doubt the media would have been pleased to help Obama carry out his threats to those Chrysler executives? Did you see any touching human interest stories about any of the AIG traders that had to give their bonuses back to the government? Do you think any of them was caring for a sick elder, or working to raise a family, or reaching the peak of a career they built with the help of hard-working parents who sacrificed everything to put them through school? Did we ever hear any of their names?

In order to keep the “partnership” between his Administration and the private sector working the way he wants it to, Obama will periodically need to remind captive corporations which side of that “partnership” has the upper hand. He can’t very well afford to have Chrysler executives publicly opposing his plans for the company, or banks shoving their bailout money back into his hands. He won’t allow himself or his party to be held responsible for the damage they have done to the nation’s financial system… any more than he will take responsibility for the first people to die under his national health care scheme. Businessmen will receive increasingly unpleasant reminders that their new government “partners” have nothing to bring to the arrangement except force, coupled with a highly developed instinct for escaping accountability.

Update: At the beginning of the essay, I used the term “executives” to broadly refer to the private citizens responsible for managing Chrysler, but several commenters pointed out that Obama’s threats were directed more specifically at the bondholders of Chrysler. I corrected the initial reference to “executives” in the interests of accuracy, and hope the reader will understand the other references to “executives” in the broader sense described above.

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