A week after Andrew Sullivan penned a Newsweek cover story asking “Why are Obama’s critics so dumb?,” David Frum responds in the same publication with a piece headlined “Obama’s critics are right.”
You don’t have to succumb to ideological fever or paranoid fantasy to see that the Obama administration is dragging America to the wrong future: a future of higher taxes and reduced freedom, a future in which entrepreneurs will innovate less and lobbyists will influence more, a future in which individuals and communities will make fewer choices for themselves and remote bureaucracies will dictate more answers to us all.
The intentions are not malign. But it’s not intentions that matter—it’s results. …
… You don’t have to vilify President Obama as a Kenyan socialist to recognize that his policies are reorienting the country toward more dependence on the federal government. Through most of the past half century, the federal government has spent about one dollar in five of national income. Right now, it’s spending about one in four. If Barack Obama is reelected and his policies are continued, that one-dollar-in-four ratio will harden into permanent reality, on the way to one dollar in three, with state and local spending on top of that.
Though he’s taken plenty of flak for his own diversions from standard conservative thought, Frum offered some interesting ideas during a 2010 interview with Carolina Journal Radio/CarolinaJournal.tv.
