Arbiter In Chief ? Is That What We Vote For ?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 ” When you are president … your job is to figure out how everybody in the country has a fair shot.… Your job as President is to think about how do we set up an equitable tax system so that everybody is paying their fair share, that allows us then to invest in science and technology and infrastructure, all of which are going to help us grow.[4] “

” As earlier statements in his career indicate, Obama’s vision of paternalistic governance is the view he brought with him to the presidency. In 1998, as a first-term Illinois state senator, he argued that in order to ensure that “nobody is left behind,” government systems must be more efficiently structured to “pool resources and hence facilitate some redistribution.” While on that occasion he underscored his proposal with the declaration that “I actually believe in redistribution, at least at a certain level,”[5] as president he uses such euphemisms as “investment,” “giving back,” “giving everyone a fair shot” or “fair share” and “economic patriotism” — all of which imply redistribution by another name.

At first glance the ideal of “fair shares for all” suggests the requirement of a political and economic framework based on Karl Marx’s distribution policy of “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”[6] But Obama’s conception of fairness is not of classic Marxist origin. As noted, it is more a reflection of philosopher John Rawls’s theory of justice and pragmatism’s varied perspectives of the self-society relationship.[7] His vision is a version of the altruist-collectivist social contract that Jean Jacques Rousseau proposed as the solution to the problem of constructing a society of freedom divorced from property ownership, which he saw as the source of a war of all against all. His thought also includes the Progressive belief, as argued by William Allen White, that the solution to democracy’s problem of unleashed self-interest lies in overcoming the spirit of commercialism with the spirit of sacrifice.[8] ”

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