The Left Doesn’t Get It—And Neither Does The Right: Obama Has Been GREAT for Big Business—But TERRIBLE for Free Markets

The New Republic—the standard bearer for the New Frontier Democrats—has a piece about how great Obama has been for business, written by Naom Scheiber. They published it about a month ago, but it’s still up there, gathering dust.

Old School Lefties don’t write much about business and finance, because Old School Lefties have never really ever understood business, finance—much less the free markets. They’re intimidated by the rowdiness of the free markets, afraid of their messiness—and they just don’t get business. It’s not an accident that rich heiresses are always Lefties: They don’t understand and in fact are intimidated by the market forces that had to be wrestled with, in order to buy them their designer lifestyles and shabby chic friends.

Lefty intellectuals (“he said sarcastically”) are great at spewing about economics in an airless, blinkered, sheltered sort of way—but they don’t have a clue about down-and-dirty capitalism. They sound like thirteen year-old boys talking about having a threesome: All heatedly imagined theory—not a lick of practice whatsoever.

The following paragraph in Scheiber’s piece is key, to understanding the Left’s misconception:

There’s always been something slightly preposterous about the idea that Obama has been bad for business. This is, after all, an administration that bailed out GM and Chrysler and propped up Wall Street at tremendous political cost, then withdrew from these sectors faster than anyone thought possible. It resisted pressure to break up big banks, re-nominated a Republican Fed chairman, and has proposed a series of business-friendly tax changes. Oh, and it just presided over the best quarter of corporate profits on record.

Let’s take it all item by item:

“This is, after all, an administration that bailed out GM and Chrysler and propped up Wall Street at tremendous political cost.”: Yes, Obama bailed out GM and Chrysler and propped up Wall Street—when he never should have.

The whole point of a free market is, You win some, you lose some. The famed Creative Destruction of the free markets should have been allowed to have its day in the sun—especially where the banking sector is concerned.

After all, the Shadow Banking system was broke: Broke-broke-broke-broke-broke! They went broke because of bad investments, foolish risks, stupid chances that they took—that they took: Nobody put a gun to their head, and forced them to underwrite ridiculous credit default swaps, or buy into ridiculously risky RMBS’s and CMBS’s.

They screwed the pooch, and found themselves circling the drain.

What did Obama do? Why, he did the Shadow Banking system the favor of a lifetime—the favor of several lifetimes: His administration bailed out the banksters! Free and clear! Without a single indictment, a single jail sentence, not even a regulatory slap on the wrist—and then? Then he gave them a truckload of money—and then? Then he left them alone!!!

As Scheiber in The New Republic writes, the Obama administration bailed out these insolvent companies, “then withdrew from these sectors faster than anyone thought possible. It resisted pressure to break up big banks.”

What does that tell you? That Obama is a Lefty who happens to be friendly with business?

No!!!—It tells you that Obama might claim to be a Lefty politician—but he’s really a Crony Capitalist.

Like the Old School Chicago pol that he is, Barack Obama cares not for ideology—all he cares about is shoring up his friends. Obama famously was supported by Wall Street in his early campaigning—so what happened when they got in trouble?

. . . you know what happened. What is happening. What will continue to happen. Banksters, banksters everywhere—bitching.

The Right is no better, at missing the boat about the Big B.O.: He’s not socialist, you fools—look how he gutted his own party’s wishes, when closing on the health care legislation.

The only people who made out like bandits were the insurance companies—everyone else got screwed. But Uncle Warren Buggerit and all the Hartford cronies? they did fine as wine . . .

Yet the Right—foolishly—labels him

The Hourly G is politically on the other side of the fence from O: But we here at Central Command would have at least respected him if he had stuck to his guns and regulated the hell out of Wall Street, then gone and done a health care reform legislation that was on the up-and-up, not on the down-low with the Insurance Boyz.

That’s not “helping business”. That’s not “helping the American economy recover”.

That is merely Old School Crony Capitalism, masquerading as “Change We Can Believe In.”