Victor Davis Hanson more often than not writes about national security, but he notices something different about the Obama presidency:

Ever since he began campaigning for the presidency, Obama has hectored the private sector — talking nonstop of higher taxes, “spreading the wealth,” “fat cat” bankers, paying your “fair share,” “millionaires and billionaires,” “corporate jet owners,” and “unneeded” income.

Such share-the-wealth tirades were matched with redistributive vendettas. Vast new financial regulations and red tape followed. A new trillion-dollar health-care entitlement was imposed on employers. The National Labor Relations Board is attempting to shut down a new Boeing aircraft plant. The federal government took over private businesses — and on occasion reversed the order of payment to private creditors. New environmental regulations have curbed energy and agricultural production. Lifelong academics and government functionaries, not businesspeople, staff the Obama Cabinet and head the administration’s agencies.

But imagine if the president had instead promoted profit-making — by cutting red tape, praising entrepreneurs, promising no new taxes or burdens on businesses, and offering incentives to open new plants inside the United States. In other words, what if small businesses and large corporations believed Obama to be a friend and partner, a leader who wanted them to make big profits, hire millions of workers, and enrich the country in the process?

The United States should be in a renaissance. In a food- and fuel-short world, we have vast agricultural and energy resources. While there are riots, strikes, and unrest from Europe to the Middle East, America remains quiet. Foreign depositors even now still believe that the United States is the least likely nation to either confiscate their capital or renege on the interest owed on it. China, Russia, and India have enormous environmental, demographic, and social challenges ahead, of the same sort the United States dealt with decades ago. Our military is far superior to the competitors.

After nearly three years of blaming, apologizing, and explaining what America cannot and should not do, it is past time for a confident President Obama to remind the country that we can do almost anything we wish.

Instead of lecturing some Americans about why they owe their existing wealth to others, why not inspire them to create even bigger new profits to enrich everyone?

Obama’s reflexive anti-business beliefs are utterly predictable, however, and not just because of his own views or the views of his party and its apparatchiks. In fact, Robert Heinlein predicted them in 1973:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”