“If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
— Barack Obama,
Roanoke, Va., July 13And 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.
Government is the hindrance that prevents even more wealth from being created.
Of course, anyone who believes society can do completely without government is an anarchist. But that is not what conservatives are after by our laments of government intrusion and obstruction. No, we most assuredly understand that government has a purpose in our society.
The question is, just how much government influence SHOULD we have? Liberal/progressives believe in an ever growing government influence into our daily lives. Conservatives, on the other hand, believe government should be limited to those items specifically addressed within the Constitution, as government’s purpose. Things like defense of the states, arbitration between the states, the infrastructure specified within the Constitution, etc.
When the importance of handing out contraceptives becomes more important to the people than maintaining our roads, that is a sign that government has become too intrusive in our daily lives. And since the natural tendency of a government, any government, is to continue to accumulate more control over it’s citizens’ lives, anyone who believes that liberal/progressive politicians can reign in and stop the advance of government intrusion is deluding themselves.
Again, government is a hindrance to wealth creation, not an enabler.
Like the good ultra-conservative you are, you’re taking what Obama said completely out of context. The complete quote is:
But regardless of the linguistic analysis, if you simply read the sentences that precede, and the ones that follow, what Obama meant is perfectly clear, in plain English. The problem is that ultra-conservatives don’t do that—they just proceed with the party line, regardless of the truth.
@johngalt: How about when Conservatives spend all of their time trying to figure out how to stop people from getting contraception and abortions, instead of jobs—that’s not an intrusion into ones daily lives. (Now who’s delusional—you.)
@Liberal1 (objectivity):
Is English your second language? Obama was clearly saying that without the “roads and bridges” those people who put their sweat and blood into building a business would not have been able to do it.
But wait. They did build it. They built those roads and bridges by sending money to D.C. for ever gallon of gasoline they bought. And many of those “roads and bridges” were not even built by the federal government, but by the states they exist in. Not only does Obama not seem to know how our government works, he seems to be rather pathetically stupid when it comes to history.
The government, in building roads and bridges with our tax money, simply responded to business. Roads, in many areas, were nothing more than dirt tracks in the landscape when Henry Ford created the assembly line and made the automobile affordable to almost everyone. The government did not help Ford do that, he did it with private investers who he had to repay, and his own genius.
Oh, but what about our interstate highway system you will ask. Well, Liberal1, again Obama is pathetically stupid when it come to history. Eisenhower ordered the building of the interstate system, but not to facilitate the advance of businesses. He did it to facilitate the transportation of rockets to all four corners of the nation. The height of a rocket loaded on a flat bed trailer determined the clearance distance for all overpasses. Those highways were not built to repond to businesses, or even motorists, but as part of our defense system.
Time after time, business came before the government. There were businesses in colonial America long before there was a United States.
Obama went off script, showing that without his teleprompter, he really does say the dumbest things. And he will pay heavily for that, because it reveals more about him than his supporters want to admit; he is not all that bright, makes major errors without a prepared speech to read from his three teleprompters and he is clueless about economics, history and the American system.
As to your comment about contraceptives and abortion: contraceptives can be purchased at any Wal-Mart for less than a six pack of cheap beer, so no, no woman is denied contraception if she gets a doctor’s perscription for them or has a free visit to her Planned Parenthood facility. Abortion? The legal murder by either dismemberment, or the burning to death with a saline solution, of an unborn child. But we know you care more about a condemned cop killer on death row than you do a child whose parents should be jailed for their total lack of responsibility.
@Liberal1 (objectivity):
Nice try at spin, Lib1, but the truth is there for anyone to see it. Clearly, you do not.
For the record;
It is very hard to make that mean other than what was said, Lib1, even though you really tried hard to do it. Where did you get your spin from? DU, HuffPo, DailyKos, or another liberal/progressive site?
The fact is, that is what you liberal/progressives believe anyways. Greg has said as much going clear back to 2008. You should be proud of what Obama said.
The only reason that you aren’t is that you have realized that what he said, which is how you all think and believe, isn’t playing well with all of the entrepreneurs and small-business owners in America, as well as those who work for them, and those who work for bigger companies.
Delusional? Look in the mirror, Lib1.
President Obama at Roanoke, Virginia on July 13:
@Greg:
“There was a great teacher somewhere in your life.”
If all that is required for success is a great teachers, then we need to start looking in the direction of teachers and ask them why there are so few of them that are “great” since the public housing projects are failed with citizens who are abstract failures at that whole “success” thing.
Teachers are paid for their services. They don’t do it for free any more than the assembly line worker puts cars together for free. Yet, it still takes the individual (the kid) to work harder than the teacher to gain good grades and make a success of a free education. A teacher cannot force you to study, force you to make good grades, force you to excel in a subject, no matter how “great” they are at their paid profession. And any other professional, who had the record of failure that teachers have, would quickly be out of a job.
Obama, like all socialists, view people as a “collective” not as individuals, just as he supports the concept of “collective salvation”. The only time he counts us as individuals is when he is pandering for our vote. That is the direct opposite of what the Founders intended; that we were a nation of individuals. The word “collective” cannot be found in the U.S. Constitution or the Bill of Rights.
There are some things that individual citizens cannot do alone, like fighting fires. But the individual does elect state and local representatives to hire people to do that for them, supported by local taxation, just as they hire people for other services, such as a police force.
Perhaps Obama holds the opinion he does because any rational thinking person understands he did not write his books on his own, he had help. In literary circles, that person is called a ghost writer.
Businesses and business owners already pay more into STATE and COUNTY coffers for roads and bridges than the vast majority of people who use them.
But the THREAT implicit in Obama’s words are that he has two great impediments to businesses and business owners IF they don’t pony up more taxes to the FEDERAL government (which, as most of us knows, doesn’t spend the most cash to build bridges or roadways.)
What, or who is that impediment Obama can use against business…..
1. Occupiers (and their ilk).
These creeps can ruin a business no matter how great it is.
They park themselves out front and you watch your sales plummet.
2. UNIONIZED municipal and county and state workers.
These creeps can put up signs between your business’s front door and your customers saying ”ROAD CLOSED for repairs.”
The sign can be there for however long it takes until their boss, Mr. Community Organizer, gets his way, I mean your money.
And see this:
http://www.ijreview.com/2012/07/11119-cartoon-i-thought-sweet-tea-came-on-the-eighth-day/
@Greg:
You forgot to highlight the sentence after the one you did highlight, Greg. Here, I’ll do it for you;
Together, both of those sentences tell the tale. And, amusing enough, it’s a very similar one to what you have professed in the future.
Obama said it. You liberal/progressives must live with it.
I just cannot understand why all of you liberal/progressives are trying to backtrack on Obama’s statement that you all believe anyways. You should be proud of what comes out of his mouth. Yet, you aren’t, and you liberal/progressives are trying to spin what he said in a “nothing to see here, move along” moment.
Honestly, if you are that dishonest to your own self, and ideology, how can we conservatives EVER believe anything that comes out of your mouths?