The Story of Obama's New Clothes and Socialism

It has been a long time since my last post. I kind of burned out and so took the summer off. We had a great summer traveling around the west and visiting AZ, NM, CO, and UT. Now I am back and starting a new semester and had an interesting conversation today. This year I am assigning Looking Backwards by Edward Bellamy. Bellamy was a socialist who wrote in the 1880. His novel was about a guy who fell asleep in 1880 and woke up in 2000. This new world in which he now lived was a perfect world according to Bellamy. The point of his novel was to compare all the problems of his day and contrasting them to this perfect society. What made the world in 2000 so perfect was that the government had taken over all business, so that everyone made the same amount of money and every just did whatever job made them happy. Bellamy spells out in detail how this new society works. What is interesting is that all my students realize that this would never work. That this guy in the 1880s had no idea about how people today think. What I find interesting is that these are the same kids who support Obama. I had to explain to them that Obama is trying to do just what Bellamy wanted, health care is just the first step. So when they read this novel they saw it as impossible when they took out the current political impact. If I said this book was written by Obama they would love it, but in its historical context they all criticized it, not one student thought Bellamy’s plan would work today, but most think Obama is right on tract. To me it proves that Obama’s plan is not practical, but political. This is why the founders so feared a dema-gog, or a president who wins solely on popularity and not his political views. For that president can put forth a plan with no merits and pass it based on his appeal. Our best hope is that more Americans can see though the Hollywood persona of Obama and finally realize once and for all that the Emperor has no clothes.