Steve Forbes‘ latest contribution to Forbes magazine focuses on President Obama’s uneasy relationship with prosperity.
NOT SINCE the New Deal’s heyday in the 1930s has Washington waged such an unrelenting assault against the private sector. Both times the result has been the same: a severely underperforming economy.
The Obama Administration has let it be known that the White House and the regulatory agencies will be issuing a blizzard of new rules and decrees in the waning months of his miserable regime. These will affect overtime, unionization, the environment and finance, among other areas, thereby hobbling enterprise even more.
Bernie Sanders calls himself a socialist. Obama has been practicing this misbegotten creed for more than seven years. The President long ago grasped that you don’t have to seize the means of production; you simply smother companies and industries with rules and regulations–preferably vaguely written to give bureaucrats wide discretion–so they survive only at your sufferance.
Banks have been reduced to the role of utilities. One group victimized has been small and new businesses, which have been starved of reasonable and reliable lines of credit since Obama took office. Hospitals and health insurers know who their real customer is these days–Big Government, not the patient. The EPA’s jihad against fossil fuels is well-known. Even the Internet hasn’t been spared, as the FCC, a supposedly independent agency, has meekly followed White House orders to hit the Net with 1930s’ rotary-phone-style regulations. This maneuver was illegal and will continue to suffocate new investment until the courts can adjudicate the matter.
Largely unremarked upon has been the Federal Reserve’s extraordinary usurpation of power, notably its seizure of nearly $4 trillion in financial assets.
In the issuance of many of these decrees lawlessness has reigned, but the White House remains unbowed, despite occasional setbacks in the courts.