Playing the fascist card
Playing the fascist card
At long last Thomas Sowell has figured out President Obama’s political philosophy. Obama is a fascist ( “Obama Isn’t a Socialist, He’s Worse: a Fascist” 6/13/12). Sowell pretends for a couple of paragraphs to confine this deep insight to “economic fascism,” a system of co-management through extensive government regulation and selective support of private business. Sowell explains that in this way the deviously clever Obama can take credit for success (thanks to government involvement) and attribute failure to the private owners. Despite the shock at discovering our president to be a fascist (fascist!) there is some sense in this reasoning.
Unfortunately, Sowell wanders way beyond economics and into the familiar and tiresome slander comparing president Obama to Hitler and hints that if Hitler and Mussolini were alive today they would be enthusiastic Democrats. At this point it becomes difficult to take Sowell seriously, so perhaps we should back up and look more carefully at his original accusation that Obama is a fascist in the economic sense of the word.
In evaluating the president’s fascism Sowell uses the word “disastrous” three times. His one and only example of such regulatory disaster is the requirement under Obamacare that “arbitrarily forces insurance companies to cover the children of their customers until the children are 26 years old.” Looking around we can find many examples of such economic fascism. In fact, it’s the way all advanced economies work. Technological development, wars, recessions, and international competition have forced our country toward ever greater central government power, crafted by innumerable Supreme Court decisions establishing the right and obligation of the federal government to effectively manage the modern economy.
Sowell insists on applying a dirty word to this inevitable development. There will be a lot more of this kind of stuff thrown at us before the election.
Clyde Morris, Liberty