Your Teacher Said What?! Read Free Page A

leader of the free world. You can get pretty drunk on that sort of stuff.
    The hangover didn’t take long coming. And it’s gotten so bad since that I can’t even see an Obama bumper sticker without getting the headache, dry mouth, and general depression all over again.
    My hangover isn’t the result of concerns about the president’s birth certificate. Or worries that he is some kind of Manchurian candidate in the pay of a foreign power. I don’t think he is Muslim, or racist, or anticolonialist, or un-American. I don’t blame him for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which was passed by the previous administration (and which, given the circumstances, I actually thought was needed). And while I don’t agree with all his foreignpolicy decisions—okay, with any of them—I know he inherited a pretty poor set of options, and also that I don’t really know enough about Iraq or Afghanistan or Iran to second-guess everything that is happening there.
    No, my problems with the president are on an entirely different plane: I hate what he’s doing to my children’s future, and I don’t have to think that Barack Obama is the devil to know that he has a very different idea than I do about what America should look like when Blake and Scott are adults.
    It’s a belief thing. Penelope and I believe in free markets—that the best economic decisions are made by the largest number of individuals acting in what they believe to be their own interests. President Obama and most of his administration believe in an economy that depends on the cleverest people acting in what they believe to be the interests of everyone else. We believe in voluntary associations. They prefer compulsory ones, at least when it comes to health insurance or union organizing.
    One thing they don’t care much for is business. Like a lot of people, I test out a lot of my thinking by talking things over with my friends. One of them is also one of Squawk Box ’s favorite guests, and not just because he was the CEO of CNBC’s parent company from the time the network was founded until he retired—as the most admired businessman in America—in 2001.
    Jack Welch isn’t sure why the current administration is antibusiness but doesn’t doubt that it is. Really antibusiness. And really intimidating. Here’s what Jack had to say on Squawk Box back in September 2010:
    Right off the bat, Joe, he’s in office one month, and what does he do? He vilifies Las Vegas, as a place “fat cats” go to conventions. Now, first off, “fat cats” don’t go to conventions; salesmen go to conventions, which doesn’t show a lot of understanding. And what’s the result: He hammers both the travel industry and the sales business.
    Then he bails out the auto industry, and the company’s bondholders get smashed—he called them “speculators”—and hands GM and Chrysler over to the United Auto Workers.
    Then, after the Supreme Court decided, in the Citizens United ruling, that corporations can spend money on campaigns in the same way unions already do, the president, in the State of the Union, ridicules the members of the court for their so-called probusiness ruling.
    I asked him, “Why doesn’t the administration see the disconnect between what you call antibusiness sentiment and what I’m sure is their real desire to add jobs?”
    â€œMaybe they’re bipolar. Or maybe it’s sleight of hand.”
    It doesn’t stop there. The president, and those sympathetic to him, follow the liberal philosopher John Rawls, who used to argue that the best society was the one you’d pick from behind a “veil of ignorance,” the one you’d design if you didn’t know whether you’d be born rich or poor and were determined to make sure that being born poor wouldn’t be so bad. Penelope and I, on the other hand, believe in a