Failure & Ideological Perspective

The coming political show-down

 

Rush Limbaugh has a unique way of getting under one’s skin especially if one happens to disagree with him. Like President Obama. Or White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Or White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. And especially if Mr. Limbaugh makes such a disdainful statement as expressing a hope that President Obama will fail. Well, this is not exactly what Limbaugh said, but for purely political purposes it is what is being interpreted and expressed by those who care nothing for, or completely misunderstand, what Limbaugh and conservatives really stand for and believe. Instead, the White House would prefer you and me to believe that anyone who disagrees with Mr. Obama is either a racist who resents a black man being in the White House or an elitist who does not care for the poor. It is not unlike the accusations against President Bush and his crew for those who were not “patriotic”. Name-calling. It’s what’s for dinner (talk). And in the midst of all these charges and counter-charges, nothing gets done. 

This Congress is clueless about what the country needs right now, and I’m not so sure the President or his economic team even knows what must be done next. And in the absence of a firm grasp of this economic melt-down, President Obama sees it as an opportunity to push a social restructuring agenda. Since the Congress is unsure about what must happen next, they do the next best thing: give-aways and ear-marks. These items translate into dollars in terms people can understand, and these dollars translate into a misunderstanding about how much the Democratic Party “cares” about Americans. This, in turn, translates into votes from the misinformed and the allegedly disenfranchised.

The failure that Mr. Limbaugh is hoping for is purely ideological, not financial or economic. The very idea that government can solve all our problems and the problems of the world if it just spends more money, particularly on social programs, is outrageous both practically and historically. The failure Mr. Limbaugh is talking about is this very notion that we can only succeed with government’s help. The failure would be the people coming to realize that overarching government creates dependency, and the Democrats seek to exploit that dependency by seeking to convince these people who are dependent that their lives would be in shambles without government support.

Just as dependency breeds dependency, success breeds success. Even failures which come, from time to time, as a result of entrepreneurial initiative breed success. These are the initiatives successful business leaders across this nation have taken their lumps in and learned from to ensure eventual success. And these initiatives have never been borne of a government’s intervention and/or control. Mr. Obama and company will ultimately fail because their first failure has been an utter refusal to acknowledge this ideological reality of capitalism. And failure breeds failure.