Obama: Order and Progress Can Only Come When Individuals Surrender Their Rights to an All-Powerful Sovereign

This is a good article about the statement in the title which Obama made and then qualified his intention in it.

There was controversy over whether sharp reactions had taken the statement out of context.  I suspect that, as is typical, Obama was trying to appear on different sides of the matter for different audiences. This article proposes that Obama tried to disown the straightforward interpretation of the words while his actions and other words portrayed someone who genuinely embraced them.

If I assume Obama does hold to such a belief, I must immediately ask, "How did The United States achieve an unprecedented orderly progress in such a relatively tiny window of world history?"  At the bottom of many, if not most questions, is clarifying definitions, and I think the answer to this question is in the fact that Obama defines both "order" (at least socially) and "progress" differently than I do.

Social order for me is in the maintenance of a very fundamental civil law, while for Obama its in manipulability and predictability.  My definition allows the greatest order within freedom, while Obama's involves an open compromise of freedom.  And, progress for me is the economic and technological progress spurred by freedom, while progress for Obama is the state's ability to coerce the distribution of wealth.  It might be said that the objective is to distribute wealth more equally.  But, first of all, governing and media entities are certainly no part of such an equality. And, apart from that, equal distribution of wealth is a fiction.  Certainly in free society, but even in totalitarian ones, different work assignments entail different compensation, and there is no functional way around that.

Also, it has been proposed that Obama subscribes to a sort of global socialism to manipulate wealth and stature across nations as well as within them.  In this, America's success is not progress at all but is unfair.  Just as nationally, wealthier people gain at the expense of the less so, globally wealthier nations gain at the expense of the less so.  I think both ideas are not only wrong but ridiculous.  Most of society gains upon the gains of the most successful.  And most nations gain upon the gains of the most successful nations.  But, an ideological dogma determines otherwise for quite intelligent people.