It is instructive that President Obama employs the European model of entitlement, regulation and income redistribution as his guide. It may be one of the few examples in history when a blatantly failed system is employed as a model for success. As the U.S. borrows more than 40 percent of the federal budget this year, we are perilously close to emulating the worst of Europe.
Will Rogers offered excellent advice for President Obama when he said, 'there are three kinds of men: the ones who learn by reading; the few who learn by observation and the rest who have to pee on an electric fence in order to learn anything.'
Although Keynesian economies promoted the big government ideal and lavish expenditures to compensate for recessionary trends, Keynes himself said, 'If Enterprise is afloat, wealth accumulates whatever may be happening to Thrift; and if Enterprise is asleep, wealth decays whatever Thrift is doing.' The key, of course, is enterprise or, if you like, productivity.
The perfect storm in the West is fostered by the decline of productivity. Instead of burgeoning 'animal spirit' of productivity, an expectation has emerged that society owes you something and that income disparity is transgressive. Capitalism can create wealth, but it also creates invidious comparisons (read: envy). Socialism tries to mitigate this eventuality through utopian engineering that never works. As Winston Churchill noted, 'The vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings and the vice of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.'
Like many unfolding events in life, it is time to state the obvious. Without productivity and enterprise, the West’s economic systems will falter and the societies themselves will be facing a very parlous period.
