Random Thoughts On The Passing Scene

By THOMAS SOWELL
Posted 07/06/2012 05:34 PM ET

Many people may have voted for Barack Obama in 2008 because of his charisma. But anyone familiar with the disastrous track record of charismatic political leaders around the world in the 20th century should have run for the hills when they encountered a politician with charisma.
• The new French president, a socialist, says frankly that he does not like rich people, that "my real enemy is the world of finance," and apparently he has plans for much higher tax rates on high incomes. Has he not noticed how easy it is for the rich to move to some other country where the tax rates are lower — or to send their money there?
• For a long time, Democrats have gone to Washington to win at all costs, while too many Republicans went to Washington to compromise with Democrats. The rise of the Tea Party may change that.
• Increasing numbers of people seem to have convinced themselves that they are entitled to a "fair share" of what someone else has earned. Whole nations now seem to think that they should be bailed out from the consequences of their own reckless spending by nations that lived within their means.
• Those who favor huge cuts in military spending seem not to understand that the military exists not simply to win wars, but to present such overwhelming superiority to potential enemies as to prevent having to fight a war in the first place.
• Some people who are belatedly seeing what Obama is really like are saying that he has changed. This is probably easier to say than admitting that you were blind to the man's whole history before, and were taken in by his rhetoric and geniality.
• Wishful thinking is not idealism. It is self-indulgence at best and self-exaltation at worst. In either case, it is usually at the expense of others. In other words, it is the opposite of idealism.
• When Harry Truman was president of the United States, he had a sign on his desk in the White House that said: "The buck stops here." If Barack Obama had a sign on his desk, it would say: "The buck stops with Bush."
•In most discussions of the problems of American public schools, the low intellectual quality of people who come out of our schools is the 800-pound gorilla that keeps getting ignored. Teachers cannot give students intellectual abilities that they themselves don't have.

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