Obama: Wealth and Property Rights Are “Selfishness” PLUS History Lessons!

Disclaimer: The videos I post are not my work. This one contains some textual remarks that are, linguistically, out of bounds for me; but I wanted to ensure, in case you missed it, that you could hear him boldly proclaim a person’s right to wealth and property was “selfishness”.

Okay, I was born in 1982, 33 days after Ayn Rand died. I don’t know how much everyone knows about her because I wasn’t around in her heyday, but many of you were. Forgive me if I inadvertently insult your collective consciousness. For the youth in the audience, listen up.

Ayn Rand was born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1905. The course of her life changed during the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 when she was just 12.

(Off topic, but if you have ever seen or read The Hunt for Red October, the Red October was a fictitious submarine named after this part of the revolution which took place in October of 1917 where the Red faction defeated the White faction setting up what became the Soviet Union.)

Ayn was educated at the University of Petrograd in St. Petersburg, Russia majoring in history. She was granted a visa in 1926 to visit relatives in America. She never went back home to Russia. She married in 1929 and became a naturalized citizen in 1931.

What makes her special is that she was born in Russia and immigrated to America where her life’s work became the rejection of socialism and communism in lieu of rational individualism and capitalism — not just any capitalism, but laissez-faire capitalism.

Essentially, she was a firm believer in the limited role of government to secure and protect the rights of the individual and to interfere minimally in the free market economy. She is what it means, governmentally and economically, to be an American.

She was a truly remarkable person having been born in Russia during the murderous end of Tsar Nicholas II’s family reign and the beginning of Lenin’s rise to power as the Soviet Union’s first leader. His contributions to Marxism are known as Leninism. He still lies in state in his own mortuary in Red Square under Russian military guard.

I’ve seen him with my own eyes and can vouch for the complete sense of oppressiveness that is communist rule. It is a feeling of total hopelessness. Indeed, the only hope most Russians had was in Lenin, their leader, worshipped as a god even to this day.

Ayn’s uniqueness led to many books, one was titled The Virtue of Selfishness. It was a collection of writings promoting rational egoism (the idea that we act according to our own self-interest with happiness being the end) and rejecting altruism (the idea of a selfless concern for the welfare of others) for its destructiveness. In traditional America, we believe in our right to the “pursuit of happiness” which is our egoism. We feel so passionately about it we call it an inalienable right given to us by our Creator.

Our altruism comes from our Christian faith of “do unto others as you want them to do unto you.” In a sense, society must be free to pursue individually its own happiness while societal and governmental altruism is destructive when placed in the hands of the government to ensure. The preamble to our Constitution says we ordain and establish our government, in part, for “promoting the general welfare.” Altruistic, yes, but the Constitution is a document which limits the role of government in our lives. It was the founder’s view and the conservative view that the general welfare is best promoted through our rights and liberties, not by government intrusion in our lives.

The bottom line is that Sen. Obama’s comments, when he said:

John McCain and Sarah Palin they call this socialistic. You know I don’t know when, when they decided they wanted to make a virtue out of selfishness.

He was alluding to the typical liberal notion that, essentially, he thinks government needs to step in and take away from others what they aren’t willing to freely give themselves. He simply doesn’t trust people to be benevolent. That isn’t hope. It’s redistributive justice based upon his viewpoint alone — socialism — and a direct affront to Ayn Rand, individualism and property rights, and free-market economics.

Meanwhile, the entire time he is preaching benevolence and quoting Scripture that “I am my brother’s keeper,” his aunt is living in a Boston slum and his relatives in Kenya are livings in huts.

Barack Obama, it’s bad enough your policies are bad for America as a whole, but it’s entirely hypocritical to dip your hand in my pocket to take what I’ve earned and give it to someone else when you yourself have demonstrated no significant leadership in this virtue.