Sowell: Obama Win Would Be Historic Tragedy

With YWN’s kind permission, a very pertinent and timely article by Thomas Sowell.

Particularly note his accurate assesment in his comments regarding nuclear proliferation, Iran, and the Jews.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008 2:07 PM

By: Thomas Sowell

Once the election is over, the glittering generalities of rhetoric and style will mean nothing. Everything will depend on performance in facing huge challenges, domestic and foreign.

Performance is where Obama has nothing to show for his political career, either in Illinois or in Washington.

Politicians telling businesses how to operate? That’s been tried in countries around the world, especially during the second half of the 20th century. It has failed so often and so badly that even socialist and communist governments were freeing up their markets by the end of the century.

The economies of China and India began to take off into high rates of growth when they got rid of precisely the kinds of policies that Obama is advocating for the United States under the magic mantra of change.

Putting restrictions on international trade in order to save jobs at home? That was tried here with the Hawley-Smoot tariff during the Great Depression.

Unemployment was 9 percent when that tariff was passed to save jobs, but unemployment went up instead of down and reached 25 percent before the decade was over.

Higher taxes to “spread the wealth around,” as Obama puts it? The idea of redistributing wealth has turned into the reality of redistributing poverty, in countries where wealth has fled and a lack of incentives has stifled the production of new wealth.

Is this the legacy we wish to leave our children and grandchildren, by voting on the basis of style and symbolism, rather than substance?

If Barack Obama thinks that such a catastrophe can be avoided by sitting down and talking with the leaders of Iran, then he is repeating a fallacy that helped bring on World War II.

America has never been a conquered country, so it may be very hard for most Americans even to conceive what that can mean. After France was conquered in 1940, it was reduced to turning over some of its own innocent citizens to the Nazis to kill, just because those citizens were Jewish.

Do you think our leaders wouldn’t do that? Not even if the alternative was to see New York and Los Angeles go up in mushroom clouds? If I were Jewish, I wouldn’t bet my life on that.

What the Middle East fanatics want is not just our resources or even our lives, but our humiliation first, in whatever sadistic ways they can think of. Their lust for humiliation has been demonstrated repeatedly in their videotaped beheadings that find such an eager market in the Middle East.

None of this can be prevented by glib talk, but only by character, courage, and decisive actions, none of which Obama has ever demonstrated.

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif.