Somewhere First Baron Passfield and his devoted wife Beatrice are beaming at the latest move by the American president who is systematically applying their strategy of methodically burying individual freedom one gradual step at a time.
Not familiar with Passfield? He was better known to Edwardian England as Sidney Webb, the man who, with Beatrice and playwright George Bernard Shaw, made the Fabian Society the icon of socialist gradualism. The Webbs also founded the London School of Economics, and stoutly defended Stalin’s brand of Soviet Communism to their dying days in the late 1940s.
But what they are best known for is the concept of Fabian patience, the idea that a western nation built on classical virtues and Christian liberty can only be converted to the beehive of socialism by shrewdly calibrated steps, each prudently presented as solving a problem only tangentially related to its true purpose.
You can read all about the Webbs and Fabian strategy in “The Democrats’ Dilemma,” written in 1964 by Phil Crane, then a conservative history professor but now better known in political circles as a long-serving Illinois congressman.
Barack Obama’s latest proposal to deal with the economic crisis he until recently described as a brewing “catastrophe” is that the federal government should be granted extraordinary new powers to seize private companies other than banks when their demise could jeopardize the national economy.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner assures us that the president’s proposal would be applied only to financial firms, but that’s merely another deceitful Washington wink-wink: Just give us this one more regulatory power and everything will be fine.
That’s what Washington politicians usually say. We all know very well that if Congress grants their request it will only be a matter of time before today’s precedent becomes grounds for tomorrow’s new expansion of government power to ever broader parts of the private sector. Obama’s proposal is a huge step towards normalizing nationalization as Washington’s preferred prescription for what ails the American economy.
Such gradual socialism is the essence of the Webb’s Fabianism: Little step here, little step there, and soon enough, you’re talking about full-blown socialism, though you would never call it that here in America, the bosom of individual liberty and free market capitalism.
So a key question is what will the business community do. We already know what Middle America will do, thanks to those rapidly spreading Tea Party Protests that are still mostly being ignored by Obama’s acolytes in the mainstream media. Come April 15, however, they will no longer be able to ignore the protests.
But business is split. Small business owners on Main Street are among the most prominent Tea Party protestors. These folks have had it with Washington wink-wink, and the high taxes, growing legions of officious bureaucrats, and red tape that always follow.
But many on Wall Street are doing what they usually do, which is looking for angles to make a deal with Obama. Lenin’s colorful term for this phenomena was “selling the rope we will use to hang them.” It must be doubly difficult to recognize the hangman’s knot when your vision is clouded by billions of bailout dollars.
So, should Congress give Obama more power to take over private businesses? Let’s review the facts: Obama, Bush, and Congress have spent more than $1.4 trillion since last September to bail out Wall Street firms that are “too big to fail,” create new or save existing jobs, and boost credit markets.
As a result, the Dow has lost half its value, unemployment levels have reached severe recession levels and, while there are hints here and there of increased lending for new and refinanced mortgages, folks seeking consumer loans are still mostly hearing rejection, and small business investment based on credit fluidity is stagnant.
So let me get this straight: The same crowd that just a few months ago was at full screech against Washington’s mismanagement of civil liberties, the Katrina recovery, the War in Iraq, the nation’s health care crisis, the Wall Street bailout and the national debt now can’t wait to give the very same the federal government unprecedented new powers over a productive part of the private economy?
Of course they do. Like Obama – and the Webbs – said, never let a crisis go to waste.
Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner and proprietor of Tapscott’s Copy Desk blog on washingtonexaminer.com.
