“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” Thus wrote the Sicilian writer Giuseppe di Lampedusa, in The Leopard. This seems to me the guiding principle of the Obama presidency. To many Americans, he seems a flaming radical. To me, he is a pragmatic conservative, albeit one responding to extraordinary times.
Professor Steven M. Bainbridge at the UCLA College of Law takes him down. “In what meaningful sense of the word have any of the following been ‘conservative’?”
Eviscerating the rule of law in the Chrysler bankruptcy so as to protect favored constituencies (mainly labor) at the expense of those to whom the law gave priority
Becoming a headhunter hiring and firing corporate directors and CEOs
De facto nationalization of the leading financial institutions
Federalizing executive compensation in the financial sector
Preempting state corporate law on issues like selection of boards of directors and compensation of executives
Refusing to let healthy institutions exit TARP
Bullying Chrysler's creditors
Playing shell games with the stress tests
An enormous expansion of the budget and huge budget deficits for as far as the eye can see
Raising the size of the government as a percent of GDP from about 20 to 22 on what seems to be a permanent basis
Planning a de facto federal takeover of health care, which amounts to 17% of the US economy (the public plan will almost certainly squeeze most private insurance out of the market, creating de facto a single payer plan)
“That's a conservative agenda?”
Well, in the sense that Obama hasn’t (yet) taken everything, I guess it could be considered “conservative”.
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