Great, Now He’s the Rewarder-in-Chief

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Hot Air:

In the frenzy over the townhall questioner’s question yesterday – “Are hot dogs and beans my new reality?” – Obama’s response has been widely missed. Yes, the response was dismissive and lame, discursive and yet virtually content-free. But it contained a brief and perfect encapsulation of his philosophy of government, which is the philosophy of government toward which the political left spent the last century trending. Video is here.

And this is the money passage:

The life you describe, one of responsibility, looking after your family, contributing back to your community – that’s what we want to reward.

I was driving and heard this on the radio – the clip was played endlessly yesterday – and my immediate thought was, “Who’s ‘we,’ keemosabe, and who died and made you God?”

The idea of a winning style of life being selected for us by a central authority – and being encouraged by “reward” – is a central tenet of Western leftism. Back when I was in college, during the Cold War, campus leftists always assured us that when we implemented this kind of authority, it would be about rewards and voluntarism, as opposed to the unfortunate practice in all existing Communist countries of making it about coercion and punishment. (They always had to be brought up short by a questioner about the “excesses” of Communist zealotry, because they never pointed it out themselves.) Obama – a close contemporary of mine in age – no doubt heard the same things from campus leftists.

But this is a collectivist idea, period. It cannot be rationalized in any political system in which individual freedom is the priority. It’s antithetical to the American political idea of limited, constitutional, republican government. Government anointing itself to set a schedule of lifestyle rewards for the people is government conceiving itself to be far too big, too intrusive, and too much aligned with a collectivist ideology.
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A system of official rewards and dependency is not freedom. And it's not what voters want.