It does not take a majority to prevail ......

Somebody asked me last Friday if I’d seen what was happening on Wall Street as far as the Dow was concerned. As it happened I hadn’t but from the tone of the question and the person’s expression I knew that the bears were on the prowl. Again!

Instead of answering the question directly, I asked one back. “Why does the market go up when unemployment is high?”

Now the person I asked is very bright but also very liberal although she protests otherwise but is, unashamedly, very Obama. Even so, I saw a flash of “the deer caught in the head lights”. She’s a very nice person and so I offered that which I believe to be the answer.

Wall Street does not look at now. It looks at the future. This, when you think about it, explains a lot. Let’s say you have a favorite stock and the yearly results are due today. You wait breathlessly and the company did so well and they report just that. But, you then check the ticker and their stock went down. How can that be? Well, Wall Street assumes that next time it won’t be so good.

Sometime last May, it was likely that Obama would be the Democratic candidate and his platform was well known, even trumpeted from sets worthy of MGM at their most flamboyant. And it was equally obvious that McCain would not prevail. Obama wowed the Left with promises of “Change”. And “Change we can believe in”. The Dow was at 14,000.

But many on Wall Street do not like change even though many heads of those same companies were big time contributors to the Obama band wagon. They are very nervous of an administration which promises to “spread the wealth”. So when they hear about limits on profits, increased business taxation such as higher corporate tax and/or payroll tax they react accordingly and so do private or institutional investors. That is why the Dow on Friday stood at a little above 7300 and why it has lost almost 2000 since Obama’s inauguration.

Is it possible that much of this crisis is being engineered by the very people who purport to fix it? Let’s take a look. A people who are fearful about their future, scared of losing their jobs and who are seeing their investments in their home and their retirement accounts being whittled away are much more likely to turn to the government than would a people who are confident about the road ahead.

As Rahm Emanuel (Obama’s Chief of Staff) put it in recent television interview, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste because it gives an administration the opportunity to do things that ordinarily it could not do”. How much plainer could that be? Obama is a Socialist and so are many of his followers both in the administration and outside it. Now, I’m not saying he’s a Marxist because I don’t know one way or the other. But he is at least a Socialist in the manner of most of the western European nations.

I lived with that mentality for years and I can tell you the law of unintended consequences reigns supreme. Socialized medicine leads to healthcare rationing. Womb to tomb welfare leads to a permanent unemployed class which leads to absence of motivation which leads to crime. Unchecked immigration leads to a permanent underclass simmering all the time and coming to boiling point at others. And there seems to be a malaise of indifference, a lack of direction, a lack of purpose and not just for individuals but for the nation as a whole. And with that comes a dependence on the state for more and more aspects of life.

I am convinced that this dependence is what Obama and his administration seeks. It’s not what Obama says but as we are starting to learn every Obama statement should have an expiration date. And, as Samuel Adams put it, “It does not take a majority to prevail”.