Get out the tinfoil hats, folks, and let us delve into the realm of raving paranoia. Is there a different way to read the news lately?

The sane answer: they’re blithering incompetents. The paranoid answer: they’re doing it on purpose.

Glenn Reynolds asks, “Why is the Gulf cleanup so slow?”

The sane answer: because the Obama administration has sold its soul to the unions, and is reluctant to do anything that would make union leaders angry.

The raving paranoid answer: Because Obama wants this oil spill to be dreadfully harmful, because it will sour Americans on drilling in the ocean, and on oil (and other fossil fuels) in general. Never waste a crisis, my friends, and this crisis can help lead all the troglodytes (that’s you and me) away from their accustomed gas guzzlers and wasteful lifestyles towards the paradise of “green” energy and sustainable lifestyles.

Nile Gardiner says, “America is sinking under Obama’s towering debt”.

With his reckless big government policies, Barack Obama threatens to run his country into the ground, with American decline the inevitable end result. It is not too late to reverse course, but so far there is not a shred of evidence that the president is willing to do what is necessary.

The sane answer: Obama doesn’t think that far ahead, and Obama has a deep and abiding faith that socialism will, despite a hundred years of evidence to the contrary, solve all of this in the long run.

The raving paranoid answer: Obama’s goal is to permanently change America, to make it cease to be the strongest nation on the planet, and to once and for all bury American exceptionalism. Destroying the economic viability of the largest economy on the planet is the goal, not an unfortunate side effect, because Americans consume more than their “fair share”. America must become a good citizen of the world and stop being so greedy. If the troglodytes (guess who?) won’t agree, Obama will use indirect means of forcing them into it.

Jimmy Bise, Jr. says: “Wealth does not come from Wealth Faeries.”

Now, those of us who get the origin of wealth understand that prosperity only happens when people own the fruits of their labor. The principle that what you produce belongs to you and you have the absolute right to dispose of it as you wish is the cornerstone of all the wealth and wonders created in America for well over 230 years. If you noodle it through, you can easily figure out why this has so. Economic freedom is the first, and most important freedom we have.

The sane answer is the one Bise gives: the progressives are deeply ignorant about the practical realities of economic theory.

The raving paranoid answer: progressives hate wealth, no matter who has it. They know that these redistribution programs will impoverish everyone, and that’s the real goal of it. The problem with wealth is that creating it at the kind of rate we do is “unsustainable”. Technological civilization, and especially the industrialized world, are careening out of control and we must step backwards from it.

Shiver. I think I need to go hide under my security blanket now.

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