Barack Hussein Obama, and those who electioneer for him, show every day what moves them and how they plan to move the people: envy. They envy the successful themselves, and they appeal to those who do. No motive endangers liberty more.

A Basis for Envy

Anyone can see why a man like Barack Obama would feel envy. He has never done a day’s work in his life other than in government. Without government to give him a job, he’d starve. (Or at least, that’s how he thinks.)

His former classmate at Columbia University suggests another reason for Obama’s envy. Wayne Allyn Root doesn’t remember Obama at Columbia. Neither did 400 other people whom The Wall Street Journal called to ask about him. Root thinks he knows why: Barack Obama was a slacker. That’s why he won’t release his college transcripts. (Another reason might be that Obama attended Columbia as a foreign-exchange student. He would never have gotten in, much less on a scholarship, under any other circumstances.)

Furthermore, Obama never wrote either of the two books that came out under his by-line. William Ayers ghost-wrote Dreams of my Father, for instance. He said so, to activist Dan Haggerty at Montclair State University in March of 2011. Your correspondent heard him:

I wrote it. You help me prove it and I’ll split the royalties with you.

So Barack Obama is every schoolmate you ever had, who wheedled you to let him copy your homework instead of doing it himself. And if you wouldn’t let him, he called you a heartless, greedy miser. That’s what Obama does today. Anyone who succeeds at anything is a greedy miser, unless he gives Obama lots of money to campaign on. (And Obama needs money badly. He gives new meaning to the phrase, “Money to burn“!)

That’s another reason for Obama to envy others, especially Mitt Romney, who’s running against him. Mitt Romney brings the money in faster than Obama can burn it. That hurts.

Politics of Envy

The real Robin Hood stands on the Castle Green near Nottingham Castle. Photo: Tom Courtney. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.

Look at Obama’s latest campaign speeches. Envy runs through them all. For instance:

It’s like Robin Hood in reverse! It’s Romney Hood!

Never mind that the real Robin Hood took money back from corrupt government officers who had robbed the people. (He championed justice, not need.) Obama accuses Romney of wanting to take from “the middle class” to give to his rich friends. First, letting someone keep more of the money he makes does not rob anyone else. Second, different fact-checkers have checked Obama’s tax story and found it false.

But the broader problem is this: Obama constantly points to signs that Mitt Romney has more “stuff” than “the average Joe.” He means to provoke envy. Why else would it matter that the Romneys own a fancy horse, or what Mitt Romney does with his money?

Danger of Envy

Envy threatens everybody in a society. A government that can take from some to give to others, can take from everyone and keep it for itself. And a ruler who uses envy to keep power, makes his subjects beg, borrow, scheme, and even steal for their supper. If a “rich” man (and how rich is “rich”?) has no rights, neither has the poor man. Under a system like that, every person envies the person who has more than he. And lives in fear of all who have less.

The old Soviet Union and the countries of the Warsaw Pact ran on envy. And we all know how well that turned out.

[amazon_carousel widget_type=”ASINList” width=”500″ height=”250″ title=”” market_place=”US” shuffle_products=”True” show_border=”False” asin=”B00375LOEG, 0451947673, 0800733940, 0062073303, 1595230734, 1936218003, 0981559662, 1935071874, 1932172378, 1936488299″ /]