Obama’s Era: The Fine Art of Selfishness

By Robert S. Siegel
Historians will look back on this era of American history as the Era of the Fine Art of Selfishness. This will be the Era in which the American people followed their leaders’ examples and hid from enormous financial problems. The American people acted as cowards, choosing to dodge responsibility and instead to pass their mistakes and resulting obligations onto future generations. The American people did this because they could and because passing the debt into the future was easy. The path of least resistance.

Those future generations have no vote today. Future generations don’t yet have Washington lobbyists, which probably gives them some sort of disadvantaged minority status. Too bad they aren’t here to speak up for themselves.

We have truly evolved from the United States of America into the United States of You Do-It. “You,” effectively means somebody other than, Me. Me, being the more than 350 million U.S. citizens alive today.

Most of you are no doubt shouting at your computer screens, “No! This is the Era of giving back! Of helping others. Self sacrifice.” First Lady Michelle Obama gave a commencement speech on Saturday encouraging students to give back to their communities. By “give back,” she means a counter to what she perceives is a culture of self-interest. She told the students, “You must reach back and pull someone up. You must bend down and let someone else stand on your shoulders so that they can see a brighter future.”

Nice sentiment. But her husband has led an effort to reach forward and take an enormous gamble with the nation’s financial future, betting against the odds and economic fundamentals that we can pay all of this borrowed money back. While Mrs. Obama was encouraging graduates to help future generations, the rest of the nation, led by her husband, has put our children up as collateral.

On Thursday President Obama made an incredible statement about his borrowing that should have been the lead to every news cast and the subject of every gathering of people in the U.S. throughout the weekend. The President said that, “The long-term deficit and debt that we have accumulated is unsustainable. We can’t keep on just borrowing from China or borrowing from other countries.”

Now he tells us.

Is this merely an attempt by the President to force through higher taxes on what he defines as the wealthy and pave the way for a wide variety of creative new taxes on everyone else, all to pay for his spending programs? Or is this something much deeper? Perhaps something far worse? Does the President finally understand that his stimulus plan will spend an amount of money far beyond anything this nation can hope to pay back? Has he finally recognized that government action has a cost and that this time the cost is the marginalization of the future? Has he looked at the future through a clearer lens and seen that his legacy is likely to be a financially weakened nation that will quickly be indentured to the vibrant and free-market Asian economies?

We have painted our theft of the future in elegant words like empathy, giving back, change, and hope. These words are used as fine works of art to paint surreal images over an ugly reality. These beautiful words hide this most selfish of thefts, a theft made essential by our refusal to face up to our responsibility for our actions. We have shifted the responsibility for our negligence into the future because we can. That is cruel. That is the fine art of selfishness.

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