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PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: [Comment at 1:47 mark] you’re right, I mean, that’s how our free market works, but I’ve made a different bet, on American workers.
I get the overall point the president was making. The problem is that he is able to recognize how a free market capitalist system works, and he speaks of it with petulance.
I think this is the starkest difference between the president and Mitt Romney. One is a free market capitalist with a history of success and financial prosperity. And the other makes a different bet, and creates a fiscal disaster.
Sifting Reality 
Good for Obama! He is right to put other values before the free market, some of those values being human dignity and respect for God’s creation. Doing God’s will is a higher value than preserving the free market. If greater economic return means that humans must suffer and that Christ’s message must be ignored, perhaps it is better to reduce the economic return a little. Do we worship economic efficiency or God? That is the question.
Anthony
If you think Obama had God’s will in mind, I’ve got bridges that need a buyer.
Obama is a socialist and not a man of God. He only went to church for political opportunism. He is a religious chameleon for his personal benefit. A man of God or a true believer would not be for leaving a live baby after birth to die or for abortion. We are called to look out for the most vulnerable but Obama instead leads them to be slaughtered. Praying for his conversion. Socialism has always failed when its been tried before. His socialist policies are failing here too.
The abortion debate is not about killing innocent life. It is about whether the government must protect life that resides within the womb. Obama believes the government should not protect life that resides within the mother. That is not the same as saying he wants innocent life to die. He is leaving that choice to the mother. You want to remove that choice.
I respect your views here, but don’t confuse a political decision with a religious one. We don’t have laws against murder because of religious reasons. It is for civil reasons. There were more than 33,000 driving fatalities last year. If the government banned driving, we would save lives. I am against a driving ban. That is not the same as saying that I support the deaths of tens of thousands of individuals.
If you define socialism as “regulated capitalism”, then I would say it is not failing. It is succeeding right here in the United States. We have labor laws, banking regulations, and other forms of regulation that affect economic transactions. These regulations are essential to our well-being and to our security. What has failed is excessive deregulation. Allowing businesses to take on more and more risk to quickly increase profits is not prudent. It has created our most recent economic disaster.
What Obama is saying is that it perfectly OK to consider human impacts when making decisions. Only considering economic efficiency and profit is foolish. Our values and security must be considered also.
I suggest that you don’t really know whether Obama is a man of God or not. Who is more a man of God: he who professes to love Christ and cavorts with prostitutes, or he who is loyal to his family and worships in privacy?
Teresa, I agree with you for the most part, but how does this tie in with the topic at hand?
John, I believe that economic and social issues are connected. Plus, I was giving a counter response to Anthony in his claim that by Obama speaking out against the free market he cares about the poor and some of his other points as well.
Anthony, You are highly mistaken. Yes it is about protecting innocent human life. The government via the constitution says we have a right to life and the Supreme Court directly contradicts that. In fact Roe v. Wade is unconstitutional. There is a separate life in another person’s body so it isn’t about privacy or about a woman’s right to choose about her own body because it isn’t ONLY about her body. Science backs me up about the fact that the fetus is a human life. Ultrasounds show this too. If you are for “choice” the choice for women to murder human life then you are abandoning the most vulnerable in society and are abandoning the protection of innocent human beings. So yes it is about protecting human life.
I was wondering why no one was blogging about Obama saying in the last debate that he was betting against the free-market, did a google search, and this site was the first hit.
Nice piece, but some of the comments are way out in left field. I missed the place in the bible where it says God does not want His people to prosper through their own work, but rather be equally miserable from an immoral, corrupt, inept, over-reaching government that “spreads the wealth around”. From what I can tell, God wants us to be blessed so that we bless others. People that are selfish and shirk their personal responsibility to bless others are the problem; free will has always been a double edged sword, as we all know. The God I read about in my version of the bible wants us to get up off our fat bottoms and go out there and take care of each other personally. Yes, I do this personally on a daily basis, and no, I don’t get paid for a vast majority of it. The idea of a government (especially the current US one) or a corporation doing things better than a private charity is ludicrous. For example, the top brass at the Red Cross (where we are old told to send donations rather than do something ourselves) are multimillionaires thanks to their salaries, and there’s still an untold amount of suffering.
The idea of driving-related deaths being the same as abortion is a startling logical fallacy. I’m surprised that someone who seems to pride themselves on their intellectual capacity can make such an argument. A driver who knows the risks and chooses to get in a car anyway is the same as a voiceless baby who isn’t given a choice? Really? That’s a dead argument even before the numbers of deaths are contrasted and eugenics and genocide against the African-American community is brought into the picture. Yeah, being pro-choice is totally aligned with God’s word. As was mentioned already, I’ve got bridges for sale, too.
Where does one come across the definition of socialism as “regulated capitalism”? That one’s new to me, and I love learning new things. Regardless, the idea that deregulation caused the current economic problems is a tired old meme that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The recent economic disaster is easily traced to the Community Reinvestment Act that started as a seemingly noble idea but was twisted by regulations over the years to force lending institutions to lend money to people that could never afford to pay it back. The current president used to push banks into doing this in his community organizer days. Good or bad, what did you expect banks to do with forced bad loans, sell them to someone else, or keep them knowing they would eventually default? Of course, banks are another federal institution that can be argued to be contrary to God’s will (Prov 22:7), which only underscores the problem of trusting the government to do everything for us. This takes us back to the free market idea of earning what you need, and personally taking care of those who can’t (those who won’t are a different matter, biblically speaking).
And for the record, there is a politician running for the highest office in the land right now that has been accused multiple times of cavorting with homosexual prostitutes. Hint: it’s the pro-socialism, pro-choice, anti-personal responsibility one.
Topo
I don’t know that there’s much to add to what you’ve already said. Even though it seemed like an innocuous statement at the time, it kept with me. It kept coming back and made me think, did Obama really agree about the free market was, then say he’s making a different bet? I couldn’t believe it when I ran it back, yeah he said that. Wow.