Is Biden Reenacting Childhood Trauma?

Economist Richard Ebeling's essay, "The Paternalist Instincts of a Central Planner," considers Joe Biden's aggressive agenda of central planning in light of his stated rationale. Much of the piece argues why governments are unable to run national economies, but there is lots of other food for thought.

I'll quote what I regard as central to Biden's motivation as the President sees or spins it, and then offer just a few of my own thoughts:

Image by NARA, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

If Joe Biden is sincere about what motivates his quest for larger and more intrusive government, then we are in the presidential executive grip of someone who is determined to make us all the players on a grand stage of life upon which he gets to make up and make right for his own frustration, anger, and embarrassment that he experienced as a youngster over a world that did not give his father a "decent break." We have a 78-year-old president with some very serious paternalism issues.

This may be true, or it may be merely one of the typical fairy tales that politicians try to create to make themselves seem "sincere," and "human," and just like the "common man," with whom Biden says he identifies. The result, nonetheless, is someone in the White House who lives in an emotive and irrational mental world, with a misunderstanding of how an economic system works and how dangerous it is to try to nullify or circumvent the laws of supply and demand, the reality of scarcity, and the value of individual freedom of choice and personal decision-making. [bold added]

Highly relevant to this are two facts that Ayn Rand amply explained, and to which I refer the unfamiliar reader via links: (1) emotions are not tools of cognition, and (2) emotions are automatized mental outputs based on facts and one's philosophical premises. So the President's Robin Hood agenda of stealing (which is wrong) feels good to him in part because (1) government doing this dirty work has been normalized for so long; (2) because of his religious convictions about sacrifice specifically and the general idea that "good" intentions can justify almost anything; and (3) he doesn't want anyone to suffer the way he did after his dad's business partner gambled away their assets.

It is a truism that victims of abuse are prone to perpetuate their own mistreatment by becoming abusers themselves. With abuse endured at a young age, this is often (but not always) the case: What other example did they have when they were children? How did this stunt their cognitive and emotional development? Such factors can make it difficult for such a child to develop into a healthy adult: Difficult, but not impossible: We all have free will, and can question what we were taught by the words and deeds of our parents and other adults. But making meaningful change is impossible without some very hard mental and emotional work, and even then, there is no guarantee of success.

Speaking of no guarantees: Joe Biden is Exhibit A. The President has already threatened to spend six trillion looted dollars and has already delivered on a third of that figure. That amount so far is: 2,000,000,000,000 dollars divided by 330,000,000 Americans, or about six thousand dollars per man, woman, and child!

Joe Biden is doing basically the same thing to this country that his father's business partner did to him. The only difference is that Biden may get a moral high, rather than a gambler's high, from doing so -- assuming he is sincere, if mistaken -- and that he claims good intentions. But anyone who expects a different result from having his nest egg stolen is a fool. Whether he realizes it or not, Joe Biden is -- in one important sense -- doing to this country something worse than what happened to his father: He is robbing us, while telling us it's for our own good. At least nobody held the business partner up as some kind of kindly uncle or benefactor.

In closing, let me trash my own title. Regardless of whether my speculation is correct, the important fact here is that the most powerful man in the world is acting on faith and emotions, rather than by evidence and reason, and that those misguided actions promise some very bad consequences for us all.

-- CAV