The Progressive-Statist Campaign, 2012

Midst an essay of M. Spalding, commenting on Obozo's Osawatomie Texas Kansas, speech:

...The choice we face, as Obama frames it, is the same offered by progressives 100 years ago: between the harshness of market capitalism (defined in true straw-man fashion as “you’re-on-your-own economics” with “a free license to take whatever you can from whomever you can”) and the fairness of progressive nationalism (the view that “we are greater together — when everyone engages in fair play, and everybody gets a fair shot, and everybody does their fair share”). 

The word “fair” recurs in various forms throughout the speech, with reminders along the way that things have to be made fair — and that means ever more government authority, programs, and regulation. “As a nation,” Obama said, “we’ve always come together, through our government.” And so Obama returned to his mantra of more federal education programs, more infrastructure spending, and more economic regulations. And, of course, raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for these “investments” would only be fair. 

Obama denies the charge of class warfare, and, as class warfare is conventionally understood, he is correct. What he is actually doing is abandoning the average, middle-class voter and his middle-class values and cobbling together an alliance of state dependents, government hangers-on, and political elites who claim the capacity to run things. Obama’s program is fundamentally about the rise of a new governing class that insists on enforcing political and economic “fairness” rather than letting us govern ourselves. The managed quest for fairness inevitably leads to bureaucratic favoritism, inequalities based on special interests, and undue political influence.

"Fair" is, of course, a remarkably elastic term which allows a great deal of subjective interpretation.  (No different from the AGW's notable failure-to-define the 'ideal' climate, by the way, except in the mechanics.)

And the alliance which Obozo seeks to form includes "large corporations"--the existence of which was just fine with TR, by the way--so long as those entities are regulated "fairly" by the Elites.  That "fair" regulation inevitably costs money, which the now-jettisoned middle class will pay.  Need an example?  Look at electric utilities, the prototype of 'large, regulated corporations.'  They bend to 'regulation'--such as closing coal-fired plants--and pass the cost on, maintaining their allowed profit-margin while serving as a shield for their Elite Masters.

This November's election is, ah, ........important.