Obama caught being a smarmy douchebag?

[giblets]

No one argues that a a civil society is not a necessary precursor. However lost in that precursor is that the hand of government really was built on the taxation of the free market. Thus the free market provided all.

With the possible exception of governments that own oil fields, of course.

[Kidlicious]

Lorizael - where does the government's money come from? It comes from free enterprise. It comes from taxation on the earnings of individuals, and on businesses. It comes from the hard work of these businessmen.

Obama's right here - Government didn't build it - the people of the united states did.

People in the government work too. Thanks.

[MrFun]

MrFun- I can't comment on your relationship with your father, but if I thought mine was remotely near working himself to death I'd tell the silly bugger to stop. There is no nobility in that. It's a tragedy.

Part of me praises workers like that father, but yes, another part of me thinks of it as a tragedy.

[Lorizael]

I just don't want Lorizeal or others to gloss over how hard business owners like the article writer's father worked all their lives.

My father tried desperately to keep his father's debt-ridden business alive for years after it was a good idea to do so. I know very well how hard business owners work.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

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

[DaShi]

So?

[Lorizael]

What’s variable is the energy, enterprise, risk-taking, hard work and genius of the individual.

Those are some of the variables, yes, but not all of them. Others include race, socio-economic status, timing, demand, and plain old ****ing luck. Government can, to an extent, ameliorate the detrimental effects of these variables, allowing energy, enterprise, risk-taking, etc. the opportunity to flourish.

[DaShi]

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

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

He'ld probably edit it three or four times to make sure.

[The Mad Monk]

[Wiglaf]

You didn't come up with that meme, someone else did it for you

[Dinner]

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.

[Wiglaf]

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

[The Mad Monk]

[giblets]

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

“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. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

"The point is, when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires."

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