“President Obama wants to put free enterprise on trial,” Mitt Romney says. But fear not, because the former governor of Massachusetts “will offer the American ideals of economic freedom a clear and unapologetic defense.”
Romney makes it sound as if he’s running against Vladimir Lenin. But what has Barack Obama actually done or proposed to do? He continued the Bush administration’s rescue of the financial system and auto industry. He passed a health-care law modeled on reforms Romney passed in Massachusetts. He passed a financial-regulation bill that erected a protective scaffolding around the banking system, but shied away from fundamentally reshaping it. He wants to extend most, but not all, of the Bush tax cuts. He has insisted that deficit reduction include some tax increases, though he has signaled he is willing to accept as many as three dollars in spending cuts for every dollar in increased taxes. He wants to raise the effective tax rates of people making more than a million dollars annually. He wants to invest in infrastructure.
You can disagree with this list without pretending it is radical or somehow inimical to free enterprise. Obama has pursued an ambitious, center-left agenda. Capitalism will survive his efforts to use market-based means to accomplish traditional liberal ends.