Britain’s Conservative MP Daniel Hannan, made famous in America for the viral YouTube video of his fiscal takedown of Gordon Brown, recently wrote of his regret for supporting Barack Obama in the general election of the 2008 presidential campaign. A European politician’s opinion of America’s president really isn’t of any importance, but his chillingly accurate description of our path toward Europeanization ought to be of concern for all who believe in promoting freedom, limited government, and economic prosperity:
None of these advantages, however, can make up for the single most important fact of Obama’s presidency, namely that the federal government is 30 per cent larger than it was two years ago
This is not entirely Obama’s fault, of course. The credit crunch occurred during the dying days of the Bush administration, and it was the 43rd president who began the baleful policy of bail-outs and pork-barrel stimulus packages. But it was Obama who massively extended that policy against united Republican opposition. It was he who chose, in defiance of public opinion, to establish a state-run healthcare system. It was he who presumed to tell private sector employees what they could earn, he who adopted the asinine cap-and-trade rules, and he who re-federalised social security, thereby reversing the single most beneficial reform of the Clinton years.
These errors are not random. They amount to a comprehensive strategy of Europeanisation: Euro-carbon taxes, Euro-disarmament, Euro-healthcare, Euro-welfare, Euro-spending levels, Euro-tax levels and, inevitably, Euro-unemployment levels. Any American reader who wants to know where Obamification will lead should spend a week with me in the European Parliament. I’m working in your future and, believe me, you won’t like it.