About half of Lynch’s points boil down to, “Obama is for x, because he makes speeches talking about x all the time.” He starts out with the best one of all:

“Unlike the many presidents who preceded him, he cares about what is best for the greater good. He truly does represent The People. His actions have always been motivated by a sincere desire to do what is best for the majority, even if it meant losing ground with the wealthy, influential or powerful minority.”

Um, yeah. That’s why he adopted a Republican “universal healthcare” proposal to require everybody to buy private health insurance — and give taxpayer money to the ones who can’t afford it. That should be popular with “The People,” all right — at least those who own stock in insurance companies. That’s why he quietly promised the drug companies he wouldn’t use Medicare’s bargaining power to negotiate lower drug prices. That’s why Joe Biden conducts copyright enforcement policy out of Disney’s corporate headquarters and the administration backs draconian copyright legislation dictated in secret by proprietary content industries.

Among my favorite other howlers:

“2. He is for civil rights. He has consistently spoken on behalf of the disenfranchised, the underdog and the most controversial members of society …”

Yeah, I know he said a lot of stuff about gay marriage and ending Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. But he refused to actually stop prosecuting gays in the military before the law was repealed, or to put enforcement on the back burner, even when he was fully capable of using his executive authority to do so.

And notice Lynch doesn’t say “civil liberties.” Obama said a lot of stuff about them, too — back in 2008. Since then he’s expanded unconstitutional wiretapping, run interference for the telecoms that help out with it and given amnesty to people who systematically ordered and engaged in torture. Holding war criminals accountable would be “divisive,” you see. He owes the late Nuremberg defendants an apology — they were only following orders, too.

4. Healthcare. I think we already covered that.

“5. He is for the middle class. Here are just a few of the comments made by President Barack Obama in recent months …”

A lot of presidents were for a lot of stuff, if you stick to reading their collected speeches. In practice, Obama’s farm policies are written by ADM and Monsanto, and the office of Secretary of the Treasury is permanently reserved for Goldman-Sachs alumni, just as under his predecessors.

Obama’s actual economic policy is classic Hamiltonianism: Responding to technologies of abundance that reduce the need for capital and labor by using Rube Goldberg mechanisms to artificially prop up the demand for those inputs — even if it means giving people tax breaks for throwing stuff away and replacing it. The stomach-churning irony is that most of the same greenwashed Whole Foods liberals who applaud this also condemn planned obsolescence and the Military-Industrial Complex, which were designed to accomplish exactly the same result. The proper approach to technologies of abundance is to make sure their benefits are fully internalized by workers and consumers, by ceasing to enforce monopolies, artificial scarcities and rents of all kind. If it takes only fifteen hours of labor a week to produce our standard of living, it should only take fifteen hours of labor to enjoy that standard of living. But that would annoy Obama’s Big Business friends.

My favorite, though, is this:

“10. He is for peace. Let us never forget that Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 …”

Yeah, he uses that Peace Prize as a paperweight to hold down his drone kill list. Obama didn’t end the war in Afghanistan — he  transformed it into a remote-control video game war in which wedding parties can be massacred at the push of a button. And of course, Lynch can’t resist throwing in a mention of the Zero Dark Thirty crap about killing Bin Laden.

I can’t help picturing someone fifty years ago breathlessly gushing “I love JFK because he’s the Peace President” — while ignoring the Bay of Pigs, the Diem assassination and Green Berets in Vietnam.

Lynch’s points, edited for substance, are basically on the same level as a guy in a bar decked out in Full Cleveland thirty years ago saying “I feel comfortable with Reagan.”  Obama’s the Reagan of moderate center-left NPR liberals who shop at Whole Foods. If you’re satisfied with the image of peace and social justice, while government in substance continues to serve the same powerful interests, keep right on voting — that’s what it’ll get you.

Transportation subsidies are pro-corporate, and not just for the contracts to create and maintain the infrastructure. They effectively hide the true cost of transporting distant goods by socializing the costs amongst all citizens.

I personally don’t drive on roads in South Dakota, nor do I even use most of the roads in Arizona, but myself and all of my neighbors are forced to support them financially. In fact, I hardly ever use the interstate highway system except for sporadic road trips. Truckers, who are seemingly always changing lanes in front of me, deliver freight for an overwhelming majority of the year, but are responsible for the same $161 out of the $50 billion that every individual American taxpayer is.

Now surely it is clear that the consumer is going to pay for the transportation of goods eventually, as every market actor seeks to minimize their own expenses by passing the buck. However, with financial assistance to distant firms, the American state is making it ever more difficult for local and regional businesses to compete with large well-established corporations. This government behavior also tragically removes the ability for consumers to choose for themselves who to support in a fair marketplace.

Without subsidies, prices for products would reflect the true costs of transportation and thus a new spirit of localism might be inspired purely by normal market processes. That inspiration would no longer depend exclusively upon the willpower and conscious consumerism of localists.

As a libertarian, I absolutely respect every individual’s right to peacefully trade his or her produce with any other person. However, I do not think the American state should take money from all taxpayers and then give it to businesses as a subsidy. Taking money from innocent people, even when the government does it through taxes, and then coercing them into paying for something which they don’t want, never asked for, or don’t agree with morally, is incredibly unjust. Any system of societal organization built upon this principle should be decisively rejected.

Eliminating this policy of indirect subsidies to big business would do much to economically incentivize community members to spend their dollars locally, and would challenge those businesses which are successful due to artificial advantages given to them through government power rather than by serving their customers well. Contrary to popular belief, the end of this anti-freedom policy is a basic way in which freeing the market would disempower America’s dominant corporate interests. Will this policy be eliminated? That seems doubtful. The things reasonable people see as its harms are basically the purpose of government in the eyes of the ruling class.