Mark Steyn is Brilliant

Transcript

HH: What did you make of the President’s non-press conference, or non-news conference with the Jumbotron in the back of the room?

MS: I didn’t see the point of it, because there wasn’t any news. I mean, what is becoming clear is that he likes talking. He had some thing today, some cockamamie, you know, pseudo-town meeting, cyber town meeting on the internet. We know he can do that. He did it for a couple of years before last November. We know he can talk. Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal said it’s a time for leadership, not talkership, and that’s what we’re getting from him. Basically, he’s talked and talked and talked, meanwhile all his administration has done is vaporize American wealth now for two months. It’s destroying American wealth, it’s destroying American jobs, it’s destroying the global economy, and all he does is talk, talk, talk.

HH: So I gather you’re not impressed that the Senate voted today to triple the size of Americorps (laughing)

MS: No, and I’ve got no time for that, actually. I’m a bit sick of the government annexation of public spirit. Tocqueville, two hundred years ago, identified America’s great resource in the civic spirit of its citizenry, that they form what they call the little platoons of society, organizational groups. The minute the federal government federalizes volunteerism, it’s just a big bureaucratic boondoggle. I think Americorps should have been abolished. It’s some ludicrous, Clintonian gimmick. The idea that it’s a permanent feature of life now is ridiculous.

HH: Now Mark Steyn, one of the most interesting exchanges in the non-news conference was when Mike Allen of Politico asked about the charitable and mortgage interest deduction scaling back for people above $250,000 dollars of annual income, family-wise. And the President said, despite evidence to the contrary, that it would have no impact on giving. It seems extraordinary that one, he denies the obvious evidence. It would be about $4 billion dollars a year by every study, and number two, that he would want to do anything that would diminish in any way the incentive to give to the private sector, except that it’s consistent with an ever-expanding public sector.

MS: No, I think actually that is the plan. I think he wants to diminish private charity, because if you look, for example, at Europe, Continental Europe, the American individual is the most generous individual in the world. He gives more money to charity than any other Western nation. What happens in Europe is when the government annexes those activities, or makes them less attractive financially, its private charities shrivel. And the way to think about Obama, I’ve concluded, is that essentially he’s not, he doesn’t have a political philosophy or a geopolitical vision. He’s a social engineer. And so his priority is always to grow government at the expense of any rival sources of legitimacy, and that’s what this charitable deduction thing does for him.