[egexgfczc]

Krauthammer gets it.



Did the state make you great?

If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

— Barack Obama,



Roanoke, Va., July 13


And who might that somebody else be? Government, says Obama. It built the roads you drive on. It provided the teacher who inspired you. It “created the Internet.” It represents the embodiment of “we’re in this together” social solidarity that, in Obama’s view, is the essential origin of individual and national achievement.

To say that all individuals are embedded in and the product of society is banal. Obama rises above banality by means of fallacy: equating society with government, the collectivity with the state. Of course we are shaped by our milieu. But the most formative, most important influence on the individual is not government. It is civil society, those elements of the collectivity that lie outside government: family, neighborhood, church, Rotary club, PTA, the voluntary associations that Tocqueville understood to be the genius of America and source of its energy and freedom.

Moreover, the greatest threat to a robust, autonomous civil society is the ever-growing Leviathan state and those like Obama who see it as the ultimate expression of the collective.

Obama compounds the fallacy by declaring the state to be the font of entrepreneurial success. How so? It created the infrastructure — roads, bridges, schools, Internet — off which we all thrive.

Absurd. We don’t credit the Swiss postal service with the Special Theory of Relativity because it transmitted Einstein’s manuscript to the Annalen der Physik. Everyone drives the roads, goes to school, uses the mails. So did Steve Jobs. Yet only he created the Mac and the iPad.

Obama’s infrastructure argument is easily refuted by what is essentially a controlled social experiment. Roads and schools are the constant. What’s variable is the energy, enterprise, risk-taking, hard work and genius of the individual. It is therefore precisely those individual characteristics, not the communal utilities, that account for the different outcomes.

The ultimate Obama fallacy, however, is the conceit that belief in the value of infrastructure — and willingness to invest in its creation and maintenance — is what divides liberals from conservatives.

More nonsense. Infrastructure is not a liberal idea, nor is it particularly new. The Via Appia was built 2,300 years ago. The Romans built aqueducts, too. And sewers. Since forever, infrastructure has been consensually understood to be a core function of government.

The argument between left and right is about what you do beyond infrastructure. It’s about transfer payments and redistributionist taxation, about geometrically expanding entitlements, about tax breaks and subsidies to induce actions pleasing to central planners. It’s about free contraceptives for privileged students and welfare without work — the latest Obama entitlement-by-decree that would fatally undermine the great bipartisan welfare reform of 1996. It’s about endless government handouts that, ironically, are crowding out necessary spending on, yes, infrastructure.

What divides liberals and conservatives is not roads and bridges but Julia’s world, an Obama campaign creation that may be the most self-revealing parody of liberalism ever conceived. It’s a series of cartoon illustrations in which a fictional Julia is swaddled and subsidized throughout her life by an all- giving government of bottomless pockets and “Queen for a Day” magnanimity. At every stage, the state is there to provide — preschool classes and cut-rate college loans, birth control and maternity care, business loans and retirement. The only time she’s on her own is at her grave site.

Julia’s world is totally atomized. It contains no friends, no community and, of course, no spouse. Who needs one? She’s married to the provider state.

Or to put it slightly differently, the “Life of Julia” represents the paradigmatic Obama political philosophy: citizen as orphan child. For the conservative, providing for every need is the duty that government owes to actual orphan children. Not to supposedly autonomous adults.

Beyond infrastructure, the conservative sees the proper role of government as providing not European-style universal entitlements but a firm safety net, meaning Julia-like treatment for those who really cannot make it on their own — those too young or too old, too mentally or physically impaired, to provide for themselves.

Limited government so conceived has two indispensable advantages. It avoids inexorable European-style national insolvency. And it avoids breeding debilitating individual dependency. It encourages and celebrates character, independence, energy, hard work as the foundations of a free society and a thriving economy — precisely the virtues Obama discounts and devalues in his accounting of the wealth of nations.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...iwW_story.html

[JimmyHas]

I'm sure if Krauthammer were here, he'd have a witty retort.

[Talicoabilk]

[LeslieMoran]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/c...2313230.column

That's just dishonest because immediately before the quote he was talking about infrastructure the "that" which he was talking about.

[downtowndude]

[hablyShappY]

Of course the Romney campaign will be happy to take things out of context.

He spent the whole speech extolling government-funded infrastructure to drive home the point that business owners need roads and therefore need the government, it was exceedingly stupid, not out of context, thank you for playing

[Pataacculakp]

You've yet to say how the meme taken from the speech (The government is the wellspring of success in America) is out of context.

[vqIo7X2U]

Except there are plenty of people who pretend their successes (and other's failures) are completely due to their own efforts, rather than being the beneficiaries (or not) of various avenues of external help.

[rasiasertew]

It was a mistake, but not really much of one. It may still be very damaging, as any insignificant thing can grow into. I highly doubt it changes much of anything though. Ds will still vote for Ds, and Rs will still vote for Rs ... and the undecided are generally the ones who actually know what the candidates are actually saying, rather than just be herded off the cliff by whatever shepherd they've chosen to blindly follow. Though I do look forward to our first president elected by internet meme.

Basically it was mis-wording of a couple sentences that in context became clear anyways.

“If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that [alone]. Somebody else made [Others helped make] that happen. Those edits are more in line with the meaning of the surrounding statements.

"If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges.

...

The point is, when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together." Perfectly reasonable points.

[QQQQQ-Trek]

Basically it was mis-wording of a couple sentences that in context became clear anyways.

“If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that [alone]. [Others helped make] that happen.

Perfectly reasonable points. Interesting interpretation. I read it as meaning:
"If you've got a business, you didn't build [those roads and bridges, the American system]. Somebody else made that happen."

[Lvnufcdc]

The speech itself was pretty ridiculous. Obama can't actually argue with his critics, so he argues with critics he makes up in his head. Critics who think that things like land-grant colleges and interstates are bad. Critics that don't actually exist.

It was quite clearly a counter to the stupid bastards who think that big business and the super rich shouldn't have to pay a fair tax rate and constantly paint their successes as if they were achieved without help from the nation as a whole.

[FBtquXT8]

Interesting interpretation. I read it as meaning:
"If you've got a business, you didn't build [those roads and bridges, the American system]. Somebody else made that happen."

You're just saying the same thing. Those are some of the specifics (like teachers) for the "not alone".

[iodillalm]

Obamacare

You mean apart from the huge boost for the insurance companies?