By Charles Kadlec

The crisis of the governing class is intensifying.

Their effort to refashion society by redistributing income and regulating markets is now hitting the reality of insufficient cash flow. Even worse, the governing elite’s self-love, sense of noble entitlement and arrogant belief that their good intentions trump bad results have led to a series of policy blunders that have destroyed jobs and businesses in the productive private sector, intensifying the government debt crises here and abroad.  

The poster children for the twin political and debt crises are Greece and Spain.

… At the federal level, the Democratic leadership acts as if pretending the crisis does not exist will make it go away.  The Obama Administration’s budget calls for more than $6 trillion in new debt over the next 10 years without ever achieving budget balance.  No wonder it was voted down by large, bi-partisan majorities in both the House and Senate. And the Democratic controlled Senate responds by simply breaking the law requiring it to pass a budget.

The President and leadership of the Democratic Party do advocate raising the tax rates on those with incomes over $250,000.  They do so in the name of “fairness” because such a tax increase would at best raise $65 billion a year in revenue, hardly enough to make a dent in the current $1.1 trillion federal deficit.

… These policy blunders in turn call into question the governing elite’s fundamental claim to power – that they can produce a more fair and just society and a more secure economic environment than the highly disorganized interplay of voluntary exchanges and organizations that are constitutive of free markets and a free society. As it turns out, the lesson of the first two decades of the 21^st century may be that a governing elite with a righteous belief in their power will achieve neither a fair nor a just society. Instead, they have become the greatest threat to the economic security of the middle class and the liberty of the people they seek to rule.     (my emphasis)

This commentary was previously posted on Forbes by one of our contributors, Charles Kadlec. To read all of his commentary, just click here.

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