Obama In His Own Words

The whole notion that Sen. Barack Obama was not intent upon engaging in socialism when he encountered Joe the Plumber is laughable. He's been preaching this kind of claptrap for years, and Naked Emperor News uncovered audio (also directly from the public radio station itself) of him suggesting that the courts should have engaged in redistribution of wealth just as surely as they moved forward with civil rights. A full transcript of Obama's policy pronouncements from a 2001 Chicago Public Radio appearance is here.

Obama is okay with spreading the wealth by any means necessary.

If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples so that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at a lunch counter and order, and as long as I could pay for it, I'd be OK. But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and the more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society, and to that extent, as radical as, I think, people try to characterize the Warren court, it wasn't that radical; it didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers and the Constitution.

Beyond this, his fundamental belief in what the Constitution means and represents is backwards. Obama opined

The Constitution is a charter of negative liberties.

Hogwash.

The US Constitution is a document that limits the rights of government to infringe on the rights of the people. The Bill of Rights was deemed necessary so as to spell out explicitly what some of those rights were in order for the Constitution to be ratified. Government action is necessarily limited to what the Constitution allows, and not a limitation on what the citizens can or cannot do. Over time, the Supreme Court has expanded and enabled the government to enter new areas of control, expanding the Commerce Clause powers, eroding the rights of the people. In some cases, the Court's tortured logic and reasoning expanding government power was because earlier cases engaged in faulty and flawed logic itself.

David Bernstein notes that Obama's political ascent reflects a belief that the courts are not where social changes are made, but rather made on the ground. Bernstein also notes that it should come as no surprise that Obama's looking to increase the wealth among the poor and down trodden; that's part and parcel of the liberal philosophy. On that, I agree. It shouldn't come as a surprise that Obama's pushing a leftist agenda; the question is just how far to the left he's going. I posit that he's clearly the most left leaning major party candidate in decades and should be repudiated as such. The nation tried the Great Society, and it failed miserably. The New Deal was largely a failure, and yet Obama's domestic policy prescriptions would create new social programs in line with those earlier failures as though they will somehow work this time.

UPDATE:
I've been having a running discussion with anonymous emailer, and in the course of that discussion, I brought up the New Jersey court's role in pushing redistribution of income in the form of Abbott districts. New Jersey's courts have essentially stated that the state's taxpayers must subsidize 31 under performing education district to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars every year (billions spent so far), and without any measurable increase in student performance. Trenton recently expanded the redistribution of taxpayer money even further - sweetening the pot so that the latest budget could get passed by increasing the number of districts that could get education money from the state. The thinking was that if more districts were given money, the redistribution would be acceptable, even ignoring the fact that the increase in money has shown no tangible improvements.

So why are those districts opposed to paying more for the under performing districts if the money isn't showing an improvement? Simple. Those districts could cut their already exorbitant taxes or spend the money elsewhere.

While Obama thinks that the redistribution of wealth via the court system isn't the best use of time and efforts, he's not opposed to doing so. As President, he would clearly have that opportunity on a national scale.