Is this the worst thing Obama has ever said?

Obama has said some pretty unsettling things in his time, but he may have just taken the biscuit.

Over the years, Obama has said some really disturbing things.

In my video on class warfare, I noted that Obama in 2008 said he wanted to raise the capital gains tax even if the government lost revenue.It was necessary to punish success, he said, to promote “fairness.”

This was an utterly malevolent statement. It meant Obama is so consumed by the politics of hate and envy that he is willing to destroy private sector output even if it doesn’t result in more money for the political class.

Now there is a new statement that may be just as bad. In a recent interview on new fees from banks, the President said, “you don’t have some inherent right just to, you know, get a certain amount of profit, if your customers are being mistreated.”

This statement is reprehensible because banks are only raising fees because of new regulations in the Dodd-Frank bailout bill. In other words, this is a classic example of “Mitchell’s Law,” which is my narcissistic way of describing how politicians mess up an economy with one bad policy and then use the inevitable damage as an excuse for imposing additional bad policy.

But there is an even deeper problem with Obama’s statement. He is saying that consenting adults in the private sector do not have a right to engage in voluntary exchange if some clown in Washington arbitrarily thinks that one side of the transaction is being “mistreated.”

At the risk of engaging in uncivil rhetoric, the President can go jump in a lake.

Under the U.S. Constitution, I do have an “inherent right” to engage in commerce. As Walter Williams has eloquently explained, it is the federal government that does not have the right to do things that are not listed in the enumerated powers section of the Constitution.

Last but not least, I’m not making a partisan attack on Obama. On many occasions, I have strongly condemned Bush for stating that, “We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move.”

Where the you-know-what did Bush get the right to declare that “we” have a responsibility? Why the you-know-what did he think that compassion is defined by spending other people’s money.

Heck, what Bush said is probably even more morally bankrupt than what Obama said.

Daniel J. Mitchell is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, the free-market, Washington D.C. think tank. His articles are cross-posted on his blog, by agreement.