Obama's World of Social Justice

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Ludwig von Mises Institute :

 

 

Obama's World of Social Justice

 

Mises Daily:Thursday, December 06, 2012 by Anne Wortham

In President Obama's much-discussed speech in Roanoke, Virginia, among his remarks on the source of success was his assertion that

 

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business — you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.[1]

 

What is one to make of the president's celebration of the government's role in the personal pursuits of citizens and his diminishment of the causal connection between the productivity of individuals and the success of their pursuits? This essay locates the source of Obama's assertion in the influence on his thought of philosopher John Rawls's theory of distributive justice and philosophical pragmatism's theories of mind, self, and society.[2] But I begin with what he asserts is the defining issue of our time:

 

Should we settle for an economy where a few people do really well and then a growing number are struggling to get by? Or do we build an economy … where everybody gets a fair shot, and everybody does their fair share, and everybody is playing by the same set of rules?[3]

 

The questions are to be expected from a president who believes that

 

When you are president … your job is to figure out how everybody in the country has a fair shot.… Your job as President is to think about how do we set up an equitable tax system so that everybody is paying their fair share, that allows us then to invest in science and technology and infrastructure, all of which are going to help us grow.[4]

 

As earlier statements in his career indicate, Obama's vision of paternalistic governance is the view he brought with him to the presidency. In 1998, as a first-term Illinois state senator, he argued that in order to ensure that "nobody is left behind," government systems must be more efficiently structured to "pool resources and hence facilitate some redistribution." While on that occasion he underscored his proposal with the declaration that "I actually believe in redistribution, at least at a certain level,"<a href="http://mises.org/daily/6288/Obamas-World-of-Social-Justice#note5#note5">[5] as president he uses such euphemisms as "investment," "giving back," "giving everyone a fair shot" or "fair share" and "economic patriotism" — all of which imply redistribution by another name.