Sean Kinsell looks at this Reason round-up of libertarian reactions to Barack Obama, then adds his own analysis.

Here's how Jonathan Rauch sees the upside and the downside:

The upside: his subtle mind, silver tongue, moderate temperament, cool deftness, and magnetic charisma. The last time we saw those traits combined was in John F. Kennedy, who I think was a good president. Kennedy gets dinged by liberals for not doing much, but that was a feature, not a bug: He was personally charismatic enough to make the country feel ably led but politically shrewd enough to avoid overreaching. If I read Obama right, he may offer a similar blend of charisma and caution. The election of a black president, opening a new chapter in America's tormented racial history, only sweetens the deal.

The downside: Obama belongs to the same party that controls Congress, and if the last 15 years have taught anything, it is to be wary of one-party government. Unified control nearly sank Bill Clinton in 1993 and 1994, and it pretty much did sink George W. Bush in 2003-2006. Obama might carry it off better in 2009-2010, but I'd be surprised. One-party rule would force the Democrats to govern from the center of their party instead of the center of the country. The natural upshot would be a leftward lurch, followed by public disgruntlement and political backlash, followed by sad talk of a second consecutive uniter who turned out to be a divider--followed, perhaps, by the realization that unifying the government divides the country.

I'm especially fascinated by Virginia Postrel's analysis of Barack Obama as a symbol.

Barack Obama has not run as the typical candidate, selling specific policies, a worldview, experience, or executive competence. He has instead sold himself, a glamorous icon onto whom supporters project their hopes and dreams and, in many cases, their own identities. If elected, he will have not a policy mandate but an emotional one: to make Americans feel proud of their country, optimistic about the future, and warmly included, regardless of background, in the American story.

The president's power has a face, and Obama's most fervent supporters believe he can repair the world with his face alone. Perhaps they're right, at least for the first month or two. We can only hope that he will respect the multiplicity of American dreams and the unpredictable ways in which their pursuit provides the basis for a better future.

Sean worries about Obama's instincts, which go to the heart of what Obama believes:

What I do think is that he believes, like a lot of liberals who approach things from an academic background, that human relations can be fixed in some ultimate way. We talk until we find common ground, we all make some compromises, and then we all go home partially happy and make the best of it. That means that those of us who believe that ideological conflict is inevitable, that in some conflicts there will inevitably be distinct winners and losers, and that competition among ideas is not only inevitable but frequently salutary, are spoiling the party. As Virginia implies, it's hard to champion both conflict-avoidance and "diversity."

Assume that A has twenty dollars, and B has ten dollars. B might want to have as much as A, but unless A had taken his money from B, A is under no more duty to give money to B than B is to give money to A. Yet according to the redistributionist logic, not only should A give some of his money to B, but if A balks at doing so, he is said to be "selfish."

But in logic, why wouldn't B be just as "selfish" if he refused to give money to A? The answer is that neither A nor B are being selfish by not wanting to give money to each other. But what has happened is that selfishness has been redefined as having to do with who has more money. It is not possible for B to be selfish with regard to A, because he has less money. Yet selfishness does not involve the state of being wealthier, any more than unselfishness involves the state of being poorer. A poor man could refuse to help a rich man (say, by blocking the road with his car and refusing to move even though the rich man needed to get to a hospital emergency room) and he would every bit as selfish as a rich man who did the same thing.

Selfishness involves being thoughtless about others, and does not necessarily have anything to do with money. Giving away money is not necessarily unselfish, nor is refusing to give money away necessarily selfish. For example, if the goal is to feel better about yourself by giving money away, it is arguably more selfish to give a dollar bill to a derelict panhandling in front of a liquor store than to walk by, because by giving him the money, you're only accelerating his demise in order to make yourself feel better. Similarly, if a rich man pays a ne'er do well son to stay away from the family, he's not being unselfish, and he might be hurting the son.

Seen this way, people who believe in the work ethic might believe it is immoral to give money to people who don't work for it, and directly damaging to the recipients. If they don't want to give money to people because of such considerations, their motives can hardly be called "selfish."

I've often thought that classical Ayn Rand "virtue of selfishness" thinking can sometimes inflame discussions of things like the trickle-down theory. The idea is that because some people (Bill Gates being an extreme example) create wealth, and the creation of wealth is a good thing for society, this means that the "selfishness" is virtuous. The problem with that argument is the assumption that wealth creators are selfish. Are they?

What is selfishness?

And for that matter, what is unselfishness? Why isn't it considered unselfish to leave wealth creators alone to create wealth and not tax them?

Why isn't taking away from people what they have earned considered the ultimate form of selfishness?

My concern here is that the definitions of selfishness and unselfishness have been so contaminated by considerations of wealth that people have lost sight of what the words mean. Returning to Sean's point, when people like Barack Obama start talking about fixing human nature, do they even understand what is being fixed?

My biggest worry is not Barack Obama, but the people he would place in charge of the innumerable federal agencies that increasingly run our lives with ever-vaster powers. We can argue over whether he is as important a symbol as he's said to be, and over whether he is in fact the socialist that he often appears to be. But there's little question that he has surrounded himself with people who are steeped in the ACORN/Alinsky community organizer/activist mindset, and that they're working their asses off for his campaign. If he wins, they'll be repaid with positions of power.

I worry that many if not most of the Obama activists do believe passionately that wealth equals selfishness. Unless, of course, it's wealth that they've "unselfishly" taken from others.

Such people find virtue in being "unselfish," yet it doesn't seem to have occurred to them that not taking from people is unselfish too.

You don't need to see selfishness as a virtue to recognize that.

UPDATE: In his discussion of the Obama plan to bankrupt the coal industry, Victor Davis Hanson notes the underlying claim that people who produce or consume heat are being "selfish," and asks a good question:

Note again the boastful Obama's usage of "bankrupt" them--as if the destruction of an entire industry that currently warms the water, cooks the food, and keeps the lights on for 150 million Americans can simply fold, without consequences to the industry's workers and to us, the consumers of their electricity. Are we to use our stoves for five or six hours a day as the wind and sun allow, in order to prove that we are 'green" and no longer 'selfish'?
So, are the selfish rich making $300,000, $250,000, $200,000, $150,000 or $120,000?

By that standard, then Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge was the most unselfish country that ever existed!

MORE: Robert Samuelson has a great op-ed titled, simply, "Poor Aren't Poor Because Rich Are Rich."

I often wish they did more teaching of these concepts in school.

(Via Greg Mankiw, who does.)