Burt Fulsom on Divisiveness

I thought this post from Burt Fulsom was worth quoting in full:

Many observers are labeling Barack Obama as a divisive president. Those critics should not be too smug, however. The single most divisive president in U. S. history was Abraham Lincoln, and historians often rate him the best, or the second best, president in the nation’s history. So divisiveness alone is not a defect as long as the cause is one that supports natural rights and rallies most of the nation. The ultimate ending of slavery is a good item on any leader’s checklist of accomplishments.

What’s different about President Obama’s divisiveness is that it was inevitable from the beginning of his presidency and it will, unless he changes course, endure until he is out of office. The message of redistribution of wealth is at the core of his belief system, and his efforts take from some groups to give to other groups, which will always cause division. The same was true of FDR, who also sparked sharp divisions in the 1930s. President Roosevelt gave subsidies to farmers, silver miners, and citizens of the Tennessee Valley, among others. At election time, the president came around to collect their votes and their campaign contributions. The Republicans for a long time didn’t know what hit them. Neither did successful entrepreneurs, who found themselves in the 90 percent tax bracket by FDR’s third term. FDR’s political game–one emulated by Mr. Obama–was to identify struggling interest groups, shower them with federal dollars, and hand the tax bill to “economic royalists,” who had more than enough to live on.

Such redistribution makes political sense, but it ruins the economy. FDR had 20.7 percent unemployment toward the end of his second term in part because wealthy Americans refused to use their remaining capital for investment. Why start a business when your profits will be confiscated if you succeed? No business means no employment and that means a lot of people looking for work–a problem afflicting both FDR and Mr. Obama.

President Reagan did have critics, but his strategy was very different from FDR’s. Reagan wanted to cut tax rates, turn entrepreneurs loose, and see what new industries would emerge to hire a new generation of Americans. During his presidency, the U. S. economy grew by more than 25 percent, and we had many new products–fax machines, cell phones, VCRs, computers. A host of relatively new inventions became household items in the 1980s and 1990s. Do you remember the first time you used a computer, or a VCR? In the course of creating all of this prosperity, many new millionaires–and even billionaires–were created. To President Reagan, this was well and good; many of these entrepreneurs were role models for what can be accomplished in a free society. But to President Obama, that success seems to have been a signal that redistribution needed to take place. And thus, after massive economic growth from 1982 to 2007, we have the current move for redistribution of wealth and the inevitable dividing of America.