If anybody has any remaining doubt that Barack Obama really does mean it when he promises to “share the wealth,” an interview he gave in 2001 to the Chicago public radio station WBEZ should clear it up.
In the interview, Obama explained why he believed the civil rights movement was a success in securing individual rights for “previously dispossessed peoples,” but, he said, the movement failed to persuade federal courts to “venture into issues of redistribution of wealth and more basic issues of economic and political justice.”
That, friends and neighbors, is the careful language of a committed leftist. This is the same rhetoric the Left has been using in America since before the New Deal and it focuses on using state power to forcibly take wealth from those who worked to create or earn it and give that wealth to others who neither created nor earned it.
The end result, of course, is supposed to be a more equal distribution of wealth throughout society and the consequent amelioration of material problems like hunger, inadequate housing and insufficient health care. It doesn’t matter that this utopia is to be achieved via legalized theft because, remember, for the Left, there are no moral absolutes, and therefore the end justifies the means.
Obama also explains that the Warren Court didn’t lead the federal judiciary into those issues of wealth redistribution because “it didn’t break free from the essential restraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution … that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties that says what the states can’t do to you, what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the state governments or the federal government must do on your behalf.”
Understand here that Obama didn’t mean this to be a positive description of the Warren Court because his comments came in the context of his explanation for why the nation’s highest court during the years of the Civil Rights movement was not really as “radical” as it was and has since been generally viewed.
Thanks to that lack of radical commitment to issues of wealth redistribution, Obama said, one of the “tragedies” of the Civil Rights movement was that because it “so court-focused, I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change”(emphasis mine).
That is the key passage of the WBEZ interview because it is Obama justifying the use of state power to forcibly redistribute wealth from those who create it to those who consume it. What the Obama presidential campaign is about is assembling the coalition of power sufficient to take from the Joe the Plumbers of America and give it to the favored recipients of the Obama coalition.
Obama was then asked by a sympathetic caller whether he believed “reparative measures” could be achieved through the courts or through legislative means. His answer is instructive about why National Journal ranked his voting record in the U.S. Senate as the most liberal and of how we should understand the legislative agenda he will pursue as president:
“Maybe I am showing my bias here as a legislator, as well as a law professor, but I am not optimistc about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts, the institution just isn’t structured that way …” In other words, since the courts are unlikely to mandate sharing of the wealth as Obama believes it should be, he has to pursue it through legislative and elective means, including most recently his campaign for the White House.
You can listen to these and additional excerpts from the 2001 WBEZ interview here.
Is Obama advocating socialism? Don’t take my word for it. Read this Wikipedia passage and note especially the reference in the third graph to the differences between socialists who are reformers and those who are revolutionaries. Obama is the former and those among his buddies like the unrepentant New Left domestic terrorist William Ayers are the revolutionaries:
“Socialism refers to a broad set of economic theories of social organization advocating state or collective ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods, and the creation of an egalitarian society[1][2] Modern socialism originated in the late nineteenth-century working class political movement. Karl Marx posited that socialism would be achieved via class struggle and a proletarian revolution which represents the transitional stage between capitalism and communism.[3][4]
“Socialists mainly share the belief that capitalism unfairly concentrates power and wealth among a small segment of society that controls capital and creates an unequal society. All socialists advocate the creation of an egalitarian society, in which wealth and power are distributed more evenly, although there is considerable disagreement among socialists over how, and to what extent this could be achieved.[1]
“Socialism is not a discrete philosophy of fixed doctrine and program; its branches advocate a degree of social interventionism and economic rationalization, sometimes opposing each other. Another dividing feature of the socialist movement is the split on how a socialist economy should be established between the reformists and the revolutionaries. Some socialists advocate complete nationalization of the means of production, distribution, and exchange; while others advocate state control of capital within the framework of a market economy.
“Social democrats propose selective nationalization of key national industries in mixed economies combined with tax-funded welfare programs; Libertarian socialism (which includes Socialist Anarchism and Libertarian Marxism) rejects state control and ownership of the economy altogether and advocates direct collective ownership of the means of production via co-operative workers’ councils and workplace democracy.”
I’ve devoted much of my adult life to the study of public policy and political philosophy, from the Pre-Socratics and Plato to Machiavelli, and from the Protestant reformers, John Locke, Publius to Marx, the Fabians and the New Left. The language Obama employs in this interview is unmistakably that of a man of the Left, which means he is an advocate of some form of socialism.
And the reason the Obama campaign reacts so angrily whenever somebody in the media asks about socialism and the Obama agenda is because, as he explained in the 2001 WBEZ interview in the context of court-mandated change, “politically it is very hard to legitimize” such action by government.
And why is that? Because the vast majority of Americans reject the idea of govenrment forcing them to accept the socialist idea of “sharing the wealth.”
HT: To Mark Levin, Talk Radio host and president of the Landmark Legal Foundation.
UPDATE: 1 Million-Plus Views
Looks like people are paying attention. YouTube’s counter shows more than a million views for the 2001 WBEZ interview excerpts audio tape posted earlier today.
UPDATE II: Time for Obama to Share His Own Wealth?
Americans for Tax Reform did some recalculating of Barack and Michelle Obama’s tax returns using his proposed tax rates instead of the current rates. Turns out the Obamas would owe substantially more – $250,727,27 – than they have actually paid. The challenge from ATR to the Obamas is to send that quarter-million-plus to the IRS, so it can be shared with the rest of us.
