A Challenge to Capitalism and the Free Market

Last week when Obama announced his punitive tax on America's lending institutions, I felt a giant question mark form above my head. In theory, he wants to recoup money from bailout losses, even making banks recoup losses from non-bank bailout recipients. How is that fair?

I am no economist. Economics and financial matters are just not my area of expertise. I readily admit this. I didn't question too loudly this plan of Obama's to "recoup" some of the money received by banks from the bailout at the time, because frankly, I just don't get it.

Marco Rubio gets it, though. He's speaking out about it. Late last week Rubio said, "At a time when American small businesses and job creators are already facing a severe credit crunch, it’s extremely unwise to be imposing a new tax on lenders that will take billions of dollars out of the capital markets and send it to Washington. We should neither bail out banks, nor impose punitive taxes on them.”

That statement promptly made him a target of Democrats who dug out information about Rubio's personal home loan and the bank that gave it to him, which as it happens, was a beneficiary of the bailout. As if that somehow implicates Rubio in anything or makes him a hypocrite.

Today, Rubio strikes back in a post at NRO's The Corner:

This is life in Obama, Reid, and Pelosi’s America, where not only is free enterprise attacked, but so too is anyone who dares to defend it...

...No one should be fooled by the spin. President Obama’s bank tax is not about recouping money for the American taxpayer. If President Obama were truly serious about that, he would call on Congress to repeal his failed stimulus program tomorrow so that future generations won’t be saddled with its crippling debt. President Obama’s bank tax is about finding new ways for the Democrats who control Congress to confiscate more money to pay for their big-government takeover.

It won’t recoup money for the taxpayer because taxpayers will ultimately pay for this tax in the form of higher costs of banking, lost jobs, and a freeze of economic activity. This tax is a cynical and intellectually lazy attempt at pitting the American people against American enterprise in the hopes that we will all forget about this President’s and this Congress’s failures in addressing job losses, reckless spending, and soaring debt.

So what does this administration have against capitalism, anyway? Profits are attacked at every turn, it seems. Obama has attacked profits of oil companies, blasted the evil insurance companies for their profits, he's lambasted the "fat cats" on Wall Street, bonuses...it goes on and on.

Maybe some liberal can explain to me why capitalism is bad and why profits and the free market must be attacked and stifled. Because I just don't get it.