Obama's Stalinism: What the fringe wants to make central

The precise moment at which ABC News' John Stossel lost his mind will, I'm sure, forever remain a medical mystery. But that this "news correspondent" of libertarian hysterics has indeed lost his mind is a sadly and increasingly pronounced fact of (his) life.

For years Mr. Stossel has been coming emotionally unglued and intellectually unhinged over the littlest things of mammoth advisability; say, restaurant fire codes or safe children's toys. His libertarian creed: let the marketplace sort this sort of thing out -- you know, if a restaurant catches fire every six months and a few of its customers die each time, then the surviving balance eventually will stop patronizing said restaurant, it will close, and the problem is solved.

See? A mollycoddling government and its obtrusive protections were never needed. People will regulate the market, so to speak, with their feet and their dollars. It's the Hayekian genius of a pure democratic economy. And any apostasy from it will, in no time at all and with absolutely no doubt, usher in an era of mean, oppressive, totalitarian Stalinist statism.

Stossel is, of course, nuts, and normally I wouldn't squander my valueless time contemplating the man's neuroses. But unfortunately he speaks for, and what's worse, even philosophically guides, millions among us. And because of his perch in network news it is wise to know what he's saying. (Just think Peter Finch and Ned Beatty in "Network": "Why me?" … "Because you're on television, dummy.")

So here it is -- what he recently wrote for Real Clear Politics (as far as I know he hasn't dumped this garbage on his viewers yet, but I suspect he will, and soon): "Barack Obama wants to use the recession to remake the U.S. economy."

Hey, that's not so bad, right? After all, if anything needs "remaking," it's our monstrously dysfunctional economy in need of recovery, right?

Wrong, according to Stossel. For him, "remaking" is an evil thing, because the economy is only sorting things out in its smartly Hooverian ways. Just leave it alone (see restaurant fire codes) and in time, things will work out.

But Stossel has a problem, a seemingly insurmountable problem: Even conservative economists these days are calling for massive interventionism. The right, in this crisis, is not holding and panic is setting in among the fringes, where Stossel reigns.

What to do, what to do, oh dear, what to do. Well, Stossel has had himself a brainstorm: just lie and distort and conflate two unconflatable propositions. And this he has done, by confusing economic "recovery" with the libertarian bugaboo of social "reform."

"Obama's nearly trillion-dollar plan," wrote Stossel, "will not merely repair bridges, fill potholes and fix up schools; it will also impose a utopian vision based on the belief that an economy is a thing to be planned from above. But this is an arrogant conceit. No one can possibly know enough to redesign something as complex as 'an economy,' which really is people engaging in exchanges to achieve their goals. Planning it means planning them."

Presto -- from gaping potholes to Marxist utopianism. Did you note that circuitous legerdemain? We have roads to be fixed; spending money on roads requires planning; planning suggests the dismantlement of democratic economics; therefore merely by fixing roads we transform ourselves from individualist democrats to collectivist Stalinists.

Stossel wasn't content with just this one razzle-dazzle. Again: "We have recovered from past recessions without undertaking a radical social and economic transformation," he wrote.

But, again, his reference to "radicalism" arose from literally nowhere. Instead, you are by now intended to take a fantastic leap of logic all on your own: government spending = socialist interventionism = radical socioeconomic transformation. Nice trick.

I won't even venture into Stossel's revelations about John Maynard Keynes. They're so bizarre, so ahistorically exotic, so intentionally misleading, for a full appreciation you really must read them yourself.

At any rate, Stossel's is the sort of sloppy and deceptive propaganda that is headed our way -- in print, on cable news shows, on Limbaughesque talk radio. I thought you might like a preview.