Steyn on Hope and Change: "Soft Choices Have Hard Consequences"

As we have written several times, private-sector employers economy can often be unfair, unethical, arbitrary, corrupt, and even illegal. Nonetheless, socialism, crony capitalism, centralized government planning, an entrenched regulatory-litigation bureaucratic system, whatever you want to call it, has never worked in any nation it has been tried. It's even worse when the architects of such failed polices never themselves ever held a real job. You may have noticed that this general state of affairs has recently caused some of President Obama's most devoted media groupies to have second thoughts about all that hope and change stuff.

The president recently commented in a television interview that the country has gotten "a little soft." In a superb column, Mark Steyn agreed, observing that "This is a great, great country that got so soft that 53% of electors voted for a ludicrously unqualified chief executive who would be regarded as a joke candidate in any serious nation."

Steyn notes that remorseful buyers in the elite or mainstream media helped hand over "a multitrillion-dollar economy to a community organizer and you're surprised that it led to more taxes, more bureaucracy, more regulation, more barnacles on an already rusting hulk?"

Steyn adds: "To a fool such as your average talk-radio host, His Majesty appears to be a man of minimal accomplishments other than self-promotion marinated in a radical faculty-lounge view of the world and the role of government. But, to a wise man such as your average presidential historian or New York Times columnist, he is the smartest guy ever to become president."

Read the entire column here.