Hold onto your wallets, here come the fairness police

President Barack Obama talks with Jon Favreau, Director of Speechwriting, in the Oval Office on Monday. (Official White House Photo)

Tonight Obama will address the nation and carry on his theme of fairness, like he did in Osawatomie earlier.

Clips from the speech posted on the White House website read:

“Think about the America within our reach:  A country that leads the world in educating its people.  An America that attracts a new generation of high-tech manufacturing and high-paying jobs.  A future where we’re in control of our own energy, and our security and prosperity aren’t so tied to unstable parts of the world.  An economy built to last, where hard work pays off, and responsibility is rewarded. …

“The defining issue of our time is how to keep that promise alive.  No challenge is more urgent.  No debate is more important.  We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by.  Or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.  What’s at stake are not Democratic values or Republican values, but American values.  We have to reclaim them. …

“Let’s never forget:  Millions of Americans who work hard and play by the rules every day deserve a government and a financial system that does the same.  It’s time to apply the same rules from top to bottom:  No bailouts, no handouts, and no copouts.  An America built to last insists on responsibility from everybody.”

Where to begin? What a pile of steaming platitudes!

We can educate people all day for high-paying jobs, but if the regulations and taxes are so onerous those educated people will have to go overseas to find jobs. Perhaps to Canada to build that pipeline to the Pacific Coast.

Fair share and fair shake? Determined by the unions, perhaps?

No handouts? To GM? No bailouts? For banks? No copouts? For Solyndra?

An America built to last depends on freedom and the opportunity to succeed or fail without government picking winners and losers.

Take the comments of Mary Kissel on The Wall Street Journal’s Political Diary today (sorry, you must subscribe for the full contents). She compared Obama obsession with fairness to that pushed by Australia’s Labor government headed by Kevin Rudd.

Rudd was elected while preaching “Forward With Fairness,” promising “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.” This turned out to mean new collective-bargaining rights for unions, a law against unfair firing and a new bureaucracy to enforce that “fairness.” The free market was simply not fair enough, Kissel explains.

With their new power, unions went on strike, idling companies and costing millions.

She concluded that Rudd’s government doled “out favors to the politically well-connected — in their case, the unions that back the Labor Party and its Green allies. It’s a fair bet that when President Obama makes the same pitch, he means exactly the same thing. There’s nothing ‘fairer’ than free-market capitalism, which doesn’t brook favors to anyone.”

Fairness can’t be dictated. But Obama has never learned this lesson. He is from central planning and will take care of everything until everyone is equally and fairly unemployed.

As former UNLV economics professor Murray Rothbard wrote:

“Whenever anyone talks about ‘fairness,’ the average American had better look to his wallet. When social pressure groups invoke ‘fairness,’ it means that American business must be saddled with quotas for mandatory hiring or promoting of myriad special interest groups, depending on who can get themselves organized and win the ear of the politicians. …

“In business, the other guy, your competitor, if he is efficient and is successfully cutting into your business, is by definition engaging in ‘unfair competition’ and ‘unfair trading practices.’

“Such strictures, of course and again by definition, never seem to apply to the subsidies you may be receiving from government or to these very cartel policies that you are calling for.”

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