Obama said in his inaugural address "preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action". It's in-your-face statism from these clowns-with-frowns.

This column notes that the employment population ratio is unchanged at 58.6%. This ratio is so low because the population of able-bodied Americans (civilian non-institutional population per bls.gov) has grown by more than 9 million since Obama took office; while at the same time the number of employed Americans has stayed nearly the same. This combination has kept the employment population ratio below 59% for more than 3 years; even after The Stimulus bill, Omnibus bill, cash for clunkers, cash for caulkers, QE1, QE2, QE3 ($85 billion / month), the twist, ect.

Milton Friedman, "Capitalism And Freedom": The triumph of Benthamite liberalism in nineteenth-century England was followed by a reaction toward increasing intervention by government in economic affairs. This tendency to collectivism was greatly accelerated, both in England and elsewhere, by the two World Wars. Welfare rather than freedom became the dominant note in democratic countries. Recognizing the implicit threat to individualism, the intellectual descendants of the Philosophical Radicals... feared that a continued movement toward centralized control of economic activity would prove The Road to Serfdom, as Hayek entitled his penetrating analysis of the process. Their emphasis was on economic freedom as a means toward political freedom.

Today's #1 cohort and sycophant, Warren Buffett (author of the Buffett Rule) is seeing a grand windfall in the "fiscal cliff" deal from his efforts through the Washington Post, Buffalo News, and 63 newspaper network of Media General. These newspapers keep the "zombies" in the dark to the Obama Administration's failed (disastrous) economic policy and the exposure of the scandals that would have collapsed any GOP leadership (Fast & Furious" and the Benghazi incompetence and cover-up). Warren Buffett's investments have seen grand rewards in the "fiscal cliff" deal. Goldman Sachs ($5 B investment just before the bailout), BofA ($5 B making Berkshire the #1 shareholder), Washington Post , and GE ($3 B investment) all saw pork in this deal.