“… you’ve made enough money.”

Once again the real Obama, the one he kept repressed well enough to get elected, pushed the cork out of the bottle when he began to speak sans the teleprompter to an Illinois crowd recently as he tried to sell his massive, ObamaCare-rivaling Wall Street reform bill.

His prepared remarks, handed out in advance to reporters, said:

“Now, we’re not doing this to punish these firms or begrudge success that’s fairly earned. We don’t want to stop them from fulfilling their responsibility to help grow our economy.”

But when he began ad libbing, it came out like this:

We’re not … we’re not trying to push financial reform because we begrudge success that’s fairly earned. I mean … I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money. But … you know … part of the American way is… you know… you can just keep on making it if you’re providing a good product or providing good service. We don’t want people to stop … ah … fulfilling the core responsibilities of the financial system to help grow our economy.

“I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money”?

“… we [don’t] begrudge success that’s fairly earned”?

“We don’t want people to stop … fulfilling the core responsibilities … to grow the economy”?

Wow! Freud would have a field day with these revealing, subconscious disclosures.

So, the worldview of the Maximum Leader is that people deserve a certain amount of money, and when they earn that amount, that’s enough? Who decides how much is enough? Him? Obama wants to limit our salt and fat intake, medical treatments, and energy consumption. Now he wants a say in the fruits of our labor?

Seems to me that how much money people want to earn is sorta’ up to them in a private enterprise economy. Obama made $5.5 million dollars last year. Good for him. But if you average his income over 12 months, he passed the “enough” mark in early January when he had already ascended into the stratospheric top 1% of incomes.

Elena Kagan, Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court (who, we’re told, really relates to “ordinary people”) revealed in her Senate Judiciary Committee hearings this week that she is a debt-free millionaire. Her net worth is more than $1.76 million according to her disclosure documents – making her distinctly unlike ordinary people. I wonder if Obama thinks she’s made enough.

Continuing his ad lib, OB said: “… we [don’t] begrudge success that’s fairly earned.” Gee. I guess success begrudgement has nothing to do, then, with a tax code that discriminates against the most successful half of income earners who pay all of the federal income tax while the political class unceasingly whines that the “rich” don’t pay their fair share.

Why even mention begrudging success unless you begrudge success?

Hey; I don’t begrudge you having a $110,000 car.

You don’t? Then why did you bring it up?

Ah! But there’s a qualifier. “We (I assume that’s the royal plural pronominal self-reference) ... we don’t begrudge success if it’s ‘fairly’ earned” And “fairly earned” would be …???

Dale Earnhardt Jr. will probably make about $35 million this year driving a car in circles at dangerous speeds. Is that fairly earned? After all, he doesn’t go anywhere.

How about Tiger Woods? Splitting his career between women and golf, (about 50/50, I think) he will still bank about $110 million this year for repeatedly hitting a little white ball and is on track to be the first athlete with a career income of $1 billion. Is that fairly earned? Has he made “enough”? Too much?

Are the billions we pay Congress and the President “fairly earned” when they push through legislation over the objections of the voters they were elected to serve? And to add insult to injury they exempt themselves from it?

Then comes this loopy Obamaspeak: “We don’t want people to stop … fulfilling the core responsibilities … to grow the economy.”

Since when did it become anyone’s “core responsibility” to “grow the economy”? I don’t think the purpose of my day job is “to grow the economy.” The economy grows when I and others do our jobs well and get to keep enough of our income from government theft that we are able to buy things and create more jobs.

In his Discourse on Trade, written in 1691, Sir Dudley North wrote:

“The main spur to Trade, or rather to Industry and Ingenuity, is the exorbitant Appetites of Men, which they will take pains to gratifie, and so be disposed to work, when nothing else will incline them to it; for did Men content themselves with bare Necessaries, we should have a poor World.”

Old Dudley understood human nature. If folks were inclined to earn just enough to get by, we would have a poorer world than the one we have. It is the “exorbitant appetites of men” that incline people to work hard and take pains (and risks) to “gratifie” those appetites. Enriching the world or local economy is a by-product of that pursuit.

But there is a way to kill the golden goose that America has been since Jamestown: implement Obamanomics. Back when Candidate Obama encountered Joe the Plumber, once again off the teleprompter, thus scaring the bejeebers out of his handlers who knew they were hearing tomorrow’s headlines, the guy who believes “at a certain point you’ve made enough money” justified his intention to raise taxes (on the half of Americans that pay them) because "My attitude is that if the economy's good for folks from the bottom up, it's gonna’ be good for everyone. I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everyone."

What a winning idea! Why don’t we start with the richest man in the world who, according to Forbes, is Carlos Slim Helú. And by a stroke of good fortune, he’s a Mexican – with a net worth of about $55 billion. Let’s see now, Mexico has a population of about 111 million people in about 28 million households … $55 billion divided by 28 million … carry the zero … good grief! If we could just persuade Slim to embrace the enlightened ideas of Obamanomics, that would give every Mexican household almost $2,000. Of course, Slim would be a one-trick pony ‘cause he could only do this once. But if we work this right, it might get the 11 million Mexican illegals who broke into our country to reverse course and break into their own country.

Like Willie Sutton, who said he robbed banks “because that’s where the money is,” the United States has its problem with illegal Mexican immigration because this is where the money is. I really get torqued by the morally bankrupt Mexican administrations whose leaders, ever since the Aztecs were in charge, stuff their pockets with cash, export their poverty to this country, and then have the chutzpah to lecture us, as Filipe Calderon did this week, about the inherent injustice of illegal immigration and the racism of the new Arizona law, which is a copy of the unenforced federal law. Of course, Barack “Blame America First” Obama, congenially standing next to Calderon, had no problem with the scolding. At least he didn’t bow to the guy.

When I think of the richest people in America – Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison (Oracle), the family of Sam Walton, and Sergey Brin (Google) – I don’t hew to any of Obama’s screwball ideas about work and wealth. It is these people, whose pursuit of stretch goal achievements created a better world – not the statist government that Obama is trying to create. These people weren’t concerned with cockamamie ideas like “core responsibilities” to “grow the economy.”

Unlike Obama’s zero-sum view of wealth, I can’t imagine that anyone feels defrauded by the billions these people have accumulated because they earned those billions in transactions where customers and clients got what they wanted in return for the money they paid over. Both parties to the transactions won – something Obama doesn’t get because he and the political class of his ilk have never ever created economic value!

Obama, Elena Kagan, and other beneficiaries of liberal guilt are elitists because they rose too fast in their careers to mature in the process. They were helped by too many invisible hands that’ll never get any credit for opening the doors to the success they currently enjoy. And they are bereft of any of the humbling reverses most of us commoners suffered early in our careers that has kept us from believing our own baloney later in our careers – unlike the Obamas of elite political society.

A Rasmussen poll this week found that many voters (41%) feel that a randomly selected sample of people from the phone book could do a better job than their elected representatives in Congress. That’s up 8 percentage points since Obama took the White House and Congress encamped in the Capitol.

I’m not surprised. Since the founding of the Republic over 200 years ago, our leaders, with few exceptions, have been lawyers, and there has been little variance in their number – about 65% of the Senate, about 50% of the House, and most of the presidents.

Ironically, the people we elect to wield the greatest influence over the American economy are the same people who have had the least success in creating it.