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…. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. –President Obama
Really? How the hell would Obama know? He’s worked in either government or the academy or as a community agitator for leftist groups his entire adult life. He has no idea how hard businessmen work to create their businesses. Not only has he never started a business, he has barely worked for one. Neither he, nor his wife, nor his mother, nor his alcoholic bigamist father ever ran a friggin’ thing. True, his grandmother ran a bank, and he was so impressed by this that he defamed her as she lay on her death-bed during his famous race speech a few years ago.
Now, it’s true, we all live in a web of inheritance and obligation. We are gifted by our ancestors with our laws, much of our infrastructure, our national habits, our safety from long-defeated foreign tyrannies, and much else. And, even in this lifetime, we benefit from the sacrifices of our parents, of the men in uniform, of the great discoveries and inventions that present day geniuses usher into existence, and, in many important respects, society is a partnership in which we all live interdependently. And one may even observe, as a believer, that our property and talents and very humanity are a gift, and all of these things are all held in trust to our Creator, who granted us everything ultimately to participate in a divine plan ordered for our benefit.
With all those caveats, none of this obeisance to tradition or family or God is present in Obama’s inhuman assault on individual talent and effort. He denies individual talent and effort. He denies enterprise and singularity and hard work and vision. His God is government, and his talk of human cooperation is really a paean to a sought-after and thoroughly un-American government organized around the goal of wealth redistribution. After all, your business isn’t yours; the government made it possible, so it can take as much or as little as it wants, and if you complain you are simply an ungrateful and arrogant bastard.
The fact that some people are enterprising, risk-taking, and energetic–and others are not–has no bearing on Obama’s vision. We’re to believe in nothing, least of all ourselves and our efforts. We’re to have no respect for the businesses that others create that a far more substantial number of people benefit from. Those that think they’re different (and who have the temerity to think they’re worth more money for their more productive economic activity) are misunderstanding things. We’re just supposed to fade away into a mediocre stew of consumers and passive takers of government services. After all, it is government and its workers that make everything possible and who can take credit for all of the hard work and inventions and risk-taking that small sliver of society, the heroic entrepreneurs, give us. We can now forget Thomas Edison and John Garand and Steve Jobs who gave us the he Light Bulb and the M1 and the iPhone. They’re no more important than the friendly folks you deal with over at the DMV.
This is not American talk. This is not an American political program. This man has no idea of what America is about. This is dangerous, communist talk straight out of the collectivist dreams of Marx, Engels, Rev. Wright, and his old leftist terrorist pal, Bill Ayers.
Subscribe To This Feed
Now, it’s true, we all live in a web of inheritance and obligation. We are gifted by our ancestors with our laws, much of our infrastructure, our national habits,…
That Obama said this is not surprising. He and the left would be the first to tell you that you did not create anything. However, I never hear them give credit where credit is due in regards to what you mention above, i.e. laws, infrastructure, etc. Huge credit should be bestowed upon the English Founding Stock of this land. Anyone with two eyes can see the differences in opportunities between the Anglo New World of Canada, Australia and the US versus the Latin New World. Yet to Obama and other Leftists, the dead, white, English guys who bequeathed this to us are evil, and America needs perfecting that can only be accomplished by demographic replacement.
In short all of us follow-on types, me included, owe a debt of gratitude to those dead English guys who created such a great system, that unfortunately is under constant assault by those too stupid to realize they are its beneficiaries.
Way to go there, take an speech out of context, substitute in meaningless words, like communism, and then skewer the straw man, for an entire post. Given the ignorance in the world, there is nothing more pathetic, than apparently intelligent people exaggerating the intentions of Public politicians to exercise their own fears.
The specific context of the speech, was to counter the meme that Government was all bad all the time, itself an exaggeration. Anyone following the recent discourse about the role of Government, would have understood that, and that’s why it was so disengenous to then hang an absolutist placard around his neck. Obama’s point was that their is symbiosis between the business community and all the enablers that provide the groundwork for their success. He has given numerous speeches to the business community, in which he praised them and their individual efforts, and the essential role they play in driving the economic growth the country depends on.
But, non of that seemed to have stuck in your memory. Any intelligent person knows these arguments are about degree’s of calibration within a free market framework. and since your clearly intelligent, it’s self evident that like most of America both left and right, you’ve succumbed to the emotive power of your tribal affiliation. At this juncture in American history, we need substantive policy debate, attacking a politician for stating the obvious does not amount to that. You are increasing the noise signal ratio in our media landscape, when we need the obvious from you.
Would it have been substantive (i.e. not ignorant, not absolutist, not emotive, not pathetic), to add to the discourse by countering Obama’s memes at a different juncture in American history? What makes this juncture different from other junctures? Is the symbiosis between the business community and the enablers more vulnerable at this juncture? Maybe at this juncture, degrees of calibration become more critical.
Andrew,
Did you actually read Roach’s post? Re-read it, and tell me where it was any of the things you stated it to be. The simple fact of the matter is, Obama said what he said, and given his somewhat socialist-leaning background, people are justified in taking it the way they did, as a clue to his actual opinions (since Obama’s actual opinions are always shrouded in obfusecation, wrapped in spin, and submerged in murky, verbiage, people are always keen to find out his real beliefs). The media are constantly telling us that “gaffes” are a key to a man’s “true” beliefs. So why is this untrue of Obama? In addition, I don’t know of a single person outside of a few Rothbardian nitwits who believe the “meme” that government is always bad. Lord knows that today’s Republicans don’t believe it. So who the Hell was Obama supposed to be arguing against? The answer is, he just couldn’t resist singing the praises of big government, even running against a big government statist corporate Republican like Romney – and that does indeed tell us something about him.
Uh-oh, it may have been a drive-by.