Obama thinks you’ve made enough money, and that it’s his to take

Ed Morrissey posts an off-the-teleprompter moment from Obama:

We’re not, we’re not trying to push financial reform because we begrudge success that’s fairly earned. I mean, I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.

Obama made $5 million last year. Why doesn’t he cede all that income to the federal government? Or hasn’t he reached the point where he believes he’s made “enough money”?

Hypocrite.

Obama of course didn’t stop at that:

Now, we’re not doing this to punish these firms or begrudge success that’s fairly earned. We don’t want to stop them from fulfilling their responsibility to help grow our economy.

Cassandra wants to know,

When did it become the “core responsibility” of ANY business to “help grow our economy”?

In the America I grew up in, the economy grows when individual businesses – who are in business to make a profit for themselves and their shareholders, not to “grow the economy” – grow and prosper. Businesses have no duty to “help grow the economy”. They don’t work for the President of the United States, nor for their fellow citizens.

They work to provide for themselves and their families.

This president displays a stunning cluelessness regarding the incentives that motivate ordinary people. Explains a lot about health care reform, doesn’t it?

It explains a lot about all his economic policies.

Postcript:
Maybe the country ought to learn never to elect to office anyone who’s never held a job in private industry.

Ed Driscoll:

This is a man whose biographer wrote in 2007:

“[Obama] always talked about the New Rochelle train, the trains that took commuters to and from New York City, and he didn’t want to be on one of those trains every day,” said Jerry Kellman, the community organizer who enticed Obama to Chicago from his Manhattan office job. “The image of a life, not a dynamic life, of going through the motions… that was scary to him.”

I took the trains (New Jersey Transit and Path) every workday from Convent Station to Manhattan. The hundreds of people in those trains were pursuing their goals, not simply “going through the motions”.

Now we’re paying (and our children and us will be paying through the nose) for having elected a narcissistic elitist socialist to the highest office in the land.

Related:
On the unintended consequences of President Obama

It’s just that President Obama’s understanding of how the world outside of politics works – he understands how the world of politics works very well – is the opposite of the truth. What he thinks will work, will fail. And what he thinks will fail, will work.

UPDATE:
At some point you have grabbed enough power