What 'Change' Means: The Cost Of Electing Obama

These are my comments which accompanied the length post of Henninger's vision of Obamerica. His stuff was good, but I didn't want my accompanying comments to get lost in the length.

I know you're out there, those of you who consider yourselves fiscal conservatives or libertarians, but who have somehow talked yourselves into voting for Barack Obama.

Many of you have persuaded yourselves that by electing a young black man as President, the nation will somehow have healed itself of the open wound of slavery and segregation.

This fantastical dream--for that's what it is--will come at an extremely high price, if, indeed, it ever does come.

Daniel Henninger puts its cost--America's transformation into a Western European-style socialist democracy--in very plain terms.

If you are going to vote for Obama, you'd better be damned sure you understand what that vote means beyond "hope" & "change." It will be a transformational change for America, a transformation--described above by Henninger--for which few Obama voters realize they are voting.

It is not sustainable. Something, folks, has gotta give. I'll give you a clue--two clues, actually:

- cuts in defense spending AND
- higher taxes

In the case of Western Europe, they have been enjoying the public good provided by our defense and security for the last 50 years.

Because they didn't have to fund a military, they could afford to build vast welfare states. Even then, with no defense expenditures and with their aging populations, they are beginning to find themselves unable to fund all the promised entitlements. In the coming years, they will either have to pursue high growth, free market policies, or see their welfare state collapse in on itself.

We cannot make the same decision of butter over guns, because there isn't another one of U.S. to maintain the peace and security on which democracy in this world hinges. Someone has to be responsible and be the world's police and it will take a high growth country to do it, not another western european socialist democracy.

Let me repeat: We cannot turn ourselves into Western Europe because we cannot, as they have done, take a break from history and rely on some unseen ally to protect us. And we ought not follow Western Europe into an unsustainable welfare-state scenario.


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