Posted on 07/19/2012 9:58:37 PM PDT by KansasGirl
“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.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Nice smackdown of the Messiah.
Nice smackdown of the Messiah.
The state didn’t build shinola!! It’s a syphon off the free economy. Anything the state built was paid for by we the taxpayers. We built the state and it’s time we pull their plug!!
Nice smackdown of the Messiah.
if the state makes me great...
do they also share in my failures?
I didn’t think so. I take all the risks, they extort all the profits
I am sure that in Obama's book, I am now a 1%-er.
In my mid-20's, my wife and I had $4 (truely) but saw an opportunity to buy and rent residential real estate. I have been a landlord now for 27 years. My day was something like this:
5:00AM - out of bed.
5:45-7:30 - Renovating the worst house in the best rental neighborhood we could find.
8:00-5:00 Regular job.
5:30-6:00 Wife meets me at the house with dinner.
6:00-12:00 Renovating house.
12:30AM-5:00AM Exhausted sleep.
5:00AM Start again.
In doing this we gave the opportunity for people to live in a better neighborhood and send their kids to better schools than if they had bought a house. Some tenants recognized this and appreciated it. A very few, however; viewed us as the man and did everything they could to avoid paying the rent. One in particular.
In the end we have been able to do good things with our money. We give back a lot but not through the government.
A few questions for Obama regarding a tenant, who looked a lot like him, that we had to evict:
Did you ever have to remove a 2 week old raw chicken that was stuffed down the garbage disposal. Picking it out rotten piece by rotten piece?
Did you ever have to replace a toilet that the tenant put put a bag of concrete in and pooped on it for a week?
Did you ever have to replace carpet after the tenant let his dog poop in the living room for two weeks while you were evicting them?
Don't tell me somebody else made it happen, my wife and I made it happen. We busted out a$$es. Oh, but we did have this secret partner called Capital Gains, who never lifted a finger to help but was there at the end with his hand out when we decided to sell.
“The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others. Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects – his laziness, incompetence, improvidence, or stupidity.”
http://umfreedom.com/2009/03/23/a-quick-summary-of-marxism/
Great post!
I have rental property and I feel your pain.
Thanks for the hotlink.
Is political profiling the next law to be passed by the Left?
Better say this no then: Obama’s Second Inaugural Speech entitled”Commune America” will include this Roanoke “If you build it, the Government Regulators will come and tear it down” installment.
BTW, if Government run schools and roads are such keys to success, then why are there more poor than rich people?
Good point. I shall use it. Thanks.
Great point!
Please use any and all of my comments that strikes y’alls fancy, ANYTIME, on ANY thread!
I’m glad that you two picked up the essence of what is a very complex topic.
If one thinks about it we, that is, ALL of us are worthless pieces of Kenyan Mud flakes, blown across the Atlantic Ocean by powerful Hurricanes, guided by high and low-pressure cells that were, in turn, controlled by Global Warming, and now we know ultimately controlled by Climate Change. VERY complex!
Only the commie-trained mind of a foreign kid who flunked Kindergarten (Obama) could possibly be able to put all of this together in the simple terms of others doing stuff for us.
(Time out here while the Liberal Lurkers weep with gratitude).
Anyway, you two have recognized, that not only is there such a thing as a two-way street, but there is now a new meaning for to the term “Roads Scholar.”
Blacktop or Concrete,
Government Road Scholars
Can’t be beat!
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm - - - ? What if an OWS punk walked on the Sacred Road built by private contractors and paid for by his parent’s tax money, got to a parents tax paid-for school, and then decided not to complete his exam at the end of that school year?
Would he graduate?
Were the taxes not high enough to build a fair share road?
Would somebody do stuff for him?
Would he have to seal his school records so that he could someday be a transparent public servant of the people?
These are important questions that we will have to ponder as we walk the road to a glorious Commune Amerika.
____________
Correction to my previous post: ‘Better say this NOW then:’ is what I thought but my sorry fingers refused to comply! Did I take the proverbial wrong road, or did the Devil make me do it?
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