No Reward For Economically Weary Americans

     I have lived through probably half a dozen recessions in my life, and each one has been followed by a period of economic reward for those having endured the economic hard times. The natural prosperity that rained down upon those willing to expose themselves to it after a recession, has been missing from the current "recovery." President Obama foretold this anemic economic growth in the beginning of his first term when he said he wanted to even out the economy and eliminate booms and busts. Unfortunately the President evened it out at a no growth level, which in medical parlance is flat lining.
     Many on the Left like to point to the growing stock market as some sort of success barometer for the economic policies of Barack Obama. But the Dow Jones Industrial Average still has not recovered to its October, 2007 level. This pathetic performance has even had the unprecedented help of artificial stimulus from the Federal Reserve, where Ben Bernankaclause lives and has been printing 85 billion dollars a month in his work shop and essentially using it to buy bonds to force money into stocks. This has also had the added effect of lowering returns for many retirees who live on bond interest. Oh, and by the way, it has also caused a desert in the lending market because rates are too low for banks to risk their money on home loans when they can earn close to the same rate in much safer deposit accounts. Banks have also been scared away from lending by the endless law suits against them by the Obama Justice Department and the thousands of new federal regulations enacted by people who never spent even one day anywhere in the financial industry.
       The President has succeeded abundantly at his task of "evening out" the economy, trouble is he has also evened out the prosperity and liberty that is part and parcel to it. The President either doesn't understand or doesn't care to understand the fact that when the free market determines interest rates and money flows, there is much more accountability and prosperity overall. Someone once said that capitalism without risk is like religion without hell. Barack Obama, and those who hold his beliefs, want to remove risk from every aspect of life and replace it with the riskiest of life's aspects, an overbearing central government. The free market punishes bad actors in it much more effectively than government, and it does so without harming those that play by the economic rules of satisfying customer needs and expectations over the long term.
     Sadly, the economic freedom that comes from the free market and is the wellspring of liberty, and for which the founders of this great nation fought so valiantly, has been dealt a staggering blow by an ideology practiced by people who see themselves as the great eveners. The problem is that once we are all even, the need for liberty will be eliminated. There is no need to be free when you are even.