In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society, but what it really means is - you're on your own. Out of work? Tough luck. No health care? The market will fix it. Born into poverty? Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps - even if you don't have boots. You're on your own.
Goldberg has a number of good and funny insights but perhaps the most interesting is the idea that Obama's logic here implies Hobbes' conception of the state of nature. Goldberg elaborates:
...philosophically, Obama's vision is 100 percent catawampus (that's right, catawampus) from the traditional American understanding of government. He sees civil society as a vacuum where, absent the federal government, we are autarkic, anarchistic individuals left to fend for ourselves, drinking puddle water and using cat fat for Chapstick...If the federal government won't do it -- whatever it is -- then we are all on our own. But that is not how the vast majority of Americans live. Nor do we define our understanding of communal, cooperative life purely through the prism of the federal government. If the federal government won't organize a bake sale at my kid's school, we are indeed "on our own," but we are not alone.
In Hobbes' view, the state of nature is nothing more than a state of war where all are against all. The central animating principle in human nature is the fear of violent death. Government is instituted by social contract but the obligation upon which that contact stands is one completely void of any moral purpose since the obligation is propped up by passions and force rather than reflection and choice. This means that before that contract, there are no obligations, no standards that bind anyone's actions. Right and wrong, just and unjust, are meaningless and have no objective standards other than the positive law, or what is laid down by the sovereign.
The Founders rejected this political philosophy. James Wilson, a signer of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, stated that "Hobbes's 'narrow and hideous' theories are 'totally repugnant to all human sentiment, and all human experience" in his Lectures on Law. In 1775, Alexander Hamilton, in The Farmer Refuted, unequivocally rejected Hobbes (and Obama):
There is so strong a similitude between your political principles and those maintained by Mr. Hobb[e]s, that, in judging from them, a person might very easily mistake you for a disciple of his. His opinion was, exactly, coincident with yours, relative to man in a state of nature. He held, as you do, that he was, then, perfectly free from all restraint of law and government. Moral obligation, according to him, is derived from the introduction of civil society; and there is no virtue, but what is purely artificial, the mere contrivance of politicians, for the maintenance of social intercourse. But the reason he run into this absurd and impious doctrine, was, that he disbelieved the existence of an intelligent superintending principle, who is the governor, and will be the final judge of the universe.
Hamilton's prescription to this understanding was to "study of the law of nature" and the works of "Grotius, Puffendorf, Locke, Montesquieu, and Burlemaqui." I would offer that same prescription to President Obama. Even more than just sheer study, I would invite Obama to drop by his local church or boy scout service project to see what people are really like without direct government help and assistance at every turn. Surely there is room for charity and everyone realizes that people do fall onto hard times, but as Ronald Reagan said, "The nine most terrifying words in English language are, 'I'm from the government and I am here to help."
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