Obama Shames America by Coveting China's Trains and Airports

An oft-repeated talking point and applause line has crept into President Obama’s repertoire of class-envy and demonizing rhetoric these days.

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“At a time when countries like China are building high-speed rail lines and gleaming new airports, we’ve got over a million unemployed construction workers — many of them Latino — who could be doing the same thing right here in the United States. That’s not right. It’s time for us to fix it.”

Setting aside the ethnic pandering inserted especially for the Hispanic Caucus audience, the blatant coveting of China’s shiny new toys is shameful.

There is something unseemly about the President of the United States publicly drooling in envy over the Potemkin Village that has been propped up in Communist China. Yes, they have fast trains and cool airports, but they were put together with little regard for safety and by the equivalent of slave labor. The central government of China has made a choice. They have chosen to erect these symbols of modern technological wonder for the sole purpose of impressing foreign rubes like Barack Obama at the expense of the hundreds of millions of people who still live in squalor.

Juxtapose Obama’s high praise for China’s trains and airports with this recent report from the largest totalitarian nation in world history:

A school minivan with a capacity of eight persons was overloaded with 66 kids recently in Qianan, north China’s Hebei Province, local police said. Policemen of Qianan Traffic Police Brigade stopped a minivan that was suspected of overload and they were shocked to discover a large group of kids, four or fives years old, packed like sardines inside the minivan.

Also, the high-speed rails that Obama constantly holds up as the ideal for America also has had its share of horrific problems:

At least 32 people died when a high-speed train smashed into a stalled train in China’s eastern Zhejiang province Saturday, state media said, raising new questions about the safety of the fast-growing rail network.

And once a visitor leaves the pretty new airports that President Obama is so impressed with and travels about 50 miles into the countryside, a visitor will often see ramshackle villages with unsanitary conditions. Let’s not forget that in 2008 a 7.9 earthquake hit the Sichuan Province killing 70,000 people. To put that in perspective, the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 had roughly the same magnitude and it killed around 3,000. Could the building regulation in modern China be that much worse than America’s building codes of 100 years ago?

Those high-speed trains that Obama is so fond of are designed to shuttle workers from their remote villages to factories where they make consumer goods that they would never be able to afford themselves with the pitiful wages they are paid. They have fast trains stretching across their country because the average Chinese citizen could never afford to purchase a car. And, if they had a car, they’d have the freedom to go wherever they choose, and the Chinese government certainly doesn’t want that.

In China, the government values fast trains and shiny airports over economic freedom and individual liberty. Here in America, we the people reverse those priorities. It would be nice to see our Chief Executive do the same.