But for god’s sake, who the hell is Fairey kidding? Obama as Guy Fawkes, a minority Catholic plotting to blow up the government who is only remembered in contemporary America because of a graphic novel and rotten movie that was a stupid anti-Thatcher allegory? Obama isn’t the solution, in part or in whole. Every bit as much as George W. Bush, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, you name it, he’s the problem. And appeals to him only shows the resolute lack of imagined alternatives to a society whose control flows from a series of aristocrats as out of touch with how the world works as King James and his crew, the target of the historical Guy Fawkes’ failed Gunpowder Plot.

Hayek dedicated The Road to Serfdom to the “socialists of both parties” and while I don’t think Obama and the Democrats are any more socialist than their counterparts in the GOP, I invite Shephard Fairey and the latter-day Establishmentarians who somehow think that Barack Obama and Timothy Geithner and Leon Panetta and Hillary Clinton will somehow effect a decentralization of power, to range around Reason.com for a while (start here, why don’t you?). Here you just might find an actual alternative to the dueling philosophies of top-down command-and-control politics that has made such a hash of the first decade of the 21st century and threatens to deaden the remaining 90 years of the only future most of us will ever have.