As Their Boss Said, 'I Do Think at a Certain Point You’ve Made Enough Money'

“White House Economic Advisors: ‘We’re Not Trying to Hurt Business … Just Reduce Profits!'”, as paraphrased by Troy Senik at Ricochet:

A beautiful bit of insight on the intellectual patterns of the Obama economic team. Jason Furman and Betsey Stevenson of the president’s Council of Economic Advisors, writing on the White House website in response to criticisms of President Obama’s proposal to increase the minimum wage:

Higher wages lead to lower turnover, reducing the amount employers must spend recruiting and training new employees. Paying workers more can also improve motivation, morale, focus, and health, all of which can make workers more productive. In addition, by reducing absenteeism, higher wages can increase the productivity of coworkers who depend on each other or work in teams. In addition, businesses can adjust in other ways rather than reducing employment (for example, by accepting lower profit margins). 

Emphasis mine. The use of “accepting” in that last sentence constitutes felony misappropriation of a verb.

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Indeed it is — and it’s right in line with this telling Kinsley-esque gaffe of the president back in April of 2010:

We’re not, we’re not trying to push financial reform because we begrudge success that’s fairly earned. I mean, I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money. But, you know, part of the American way is, you know, you can just keep on making it if you’re providing a good product or providing good service. We don’t want people to stop, ah, fulfilling the core responsibilities of the financial system to help grow our economy.

As Ed Morrissey wrote at the time:

He should have stuck with the TelePrompter. The President doesn’t get to decide when people have “made enough money.” In fact, as the radio host notes, that’s a statist point of view. Furthermore, the responsibility of an entrepreneur isn’t to “grow our economy,” core or otherwise. It’s to grow his own economy. In a properly regulated capitalist system, the natural tension of self-interests create economic growth through innovation and efficient use of capital and resources.

Put simply, a free people work for themselves, not for the government. Barack Obama seems to have a problem understanding that.

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Which isn’t surprising; his sycophantic Palace Guard media have tried to convince their audiences that the nation works for Obama even before he took office; why wouldn’t the president and his staff internalize such fascistic beliefs themselves?

Last month, Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute noted that nearly 50 years ago, journalist Henry Hazlitt summed up the mindset behind this sort of punitive ideology in a single sentence:

The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others.

[MP: Or according to our Marxist-in-Chief: “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”]

Such thinking leads to madness; best to analyze it on the therapist’s couch before inflicting the psychosis upon an entire city or nation, as Chris Muir notes today in his latest “Day by Day” cartoon, featuring a cameo from PJM’s own Dr. Helen:

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