Channeling Elizabeth “Spreading Bull” Warren, the president’s latest message to Americans.
I think it’s just typical leftist projection, because I think a lot of Americans are justifiably thinking the same thing about him.
If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build it? Really? Tell it to Elon Musk.
There are two mutually compatible but different strains of lunacy running rampant in the Democratic Party, either of which (maybe both!) might be what Obama is expressing in his statement.
The first lunacy is basic Marxist claptrap which denigrates the individual, thinks that all achievement properly belongs to the state, and that any individual success is due to pure luck at best, or pure theft at worst.
The other strain of lunacy is the belief that advocates of limited government are wild-eyed anarchists who want to eliminate all state power. It’s not just propaganda, the left really thinks this is true about groups like the Tea Party. This crazy belief helps Democrats sustain their faith in state power when Big Government is subject to legitimate criticism.
Obama’s stupidity does cover such a broad range, though. The only jobs Obama has created are in Mitt Romney’s advertising staff, who are getting so swamped with Obama’s moronic statements that they can’t keep up without hiring more workers.
Oh, and I forgot to hit hit sentences before the above one.
So because someone helped me once, perhaps a teacher who was paid at the time the help was given, I’m supposed to give Obama money for it now? What if the teacher was a Republican? What if Elon Musk’s teacher was in South Africa?
Then Obama moves on to roads and bridges. We, our parents, and our grandparents have been paying for those roads and bridges since we first started building them. Take the Brooklyn Bridge. It was paid for long, long ago, but Obama is apparently trying to bill us for it again. I don’t want to buy the Brooklyn Bridge and he sure as hell doesn’t own it. NO SALE.
Is he this stupid because he thinks when we build now, we don’t pay the bridge folks until two generations have elapsed? Why yes, that’s probably exactly how he thinks it works. If he’s running up debts that will burden our children’s children, he must think we’re still trying to pay off projects from the Hoover administration. Did anyone save their receipts for those? It seems we’re going to need them for the audit.
Yes. it’s so clear. Musk would have built his business, out of stone knives and bearskins, regardless. U.S., South Africa, Zimbabwe. Unimportant. The individual is all. The ability to build his business in the U.S.? Unimportant. The individual is all.
Elon could’ve started his company just about anywhere that wouldn’t tax him silly and it would’ve worked. But along the way he had help, like the stores that sold him food. Without food he would’ve died. So now he needs to give to Obama because what the grocery store charged him apparently didn’t cover his obligations? This is somewhere between pan handling and outright fraud. “Some people I’ve never met probably helped you [and got paid], so pay me for their work, too.”
I think not. The SpaceX business model to date has been heavily dependent on selling to the U.S. government, which has an explicit preference for U.S. companies, and on using derivatives of technology developed by the government and its contractors.
SpaceX hasn’t been “dependent” on the government as a customer. If you look at their manifest it’s considerably diverse. The government is one customer. And the reason for that is simple; they provide a service at a cost that is lower than anyone else. As for using technology developed by the government in the past, that technology was developed at taxpayer expense. In effect you’re saying that because Elon was too young to be one of those taxpayers he isn’t entitled to the technology.
And that’s being generous.
If you look at their record to date, they’ve only launched one small non-government payload on the Falcon 1, at a list price of $7 million, and splashed a quarter of another. To date, that’s completely dwarfed by the government spending. Which is fine. But he isn’t cheaper than anyone else, he’s just cheaper than any U.S. company. Which is the point. In the hypothetical world where he built his company outside the U.S., he wouldn’t get the U.S. Government business, and he wouldn’t get the technology transfer.
They have received millions to date from customers who want them to launch stuff for them. They just haven’t completed the launches yet. And as for being cheaper than non-us companies, the Chinese certainly aren’t cheaper.
The payments from customers is also dwarfed by the contributions of investors which is also more than payments from the government.
Um, the business Elon started from nothing was Pay Pal.
Actually, no. Musk did not start the business now known as PayPal. Peter Thiel and others preceded Musk’s involvment.
So, basically you’re saying if Musk hadn’t done it, someone else would have, and Musk essentially just won the lottery.
You, Sir, are a swine.
Thank you so much for providing an example of the type 2 SOL I described in the first comment.
Musk is the first to admit he stands on the shoulders of giants and is grateful for the assistance and accumulated wisdom of NASA. And all fair thinking people acknowledge this.
So may your straw man, “the individual is all”, give you comfort in these trying times of the manifest multiple failures of Big Government.
“If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life.”
Sure, he had Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright.
It’s not difficult to figure out that someone who made a fortune off of writing two memoirs of a life that he had actually gone to the trouble of having lived would feel that great wealth is no real achievement, and not earned.
That should have been “not actually gone to the bother of having lived…”
Kinda loses its punch when corrected like that…
“The government invented the Internet” myth is pervasive. The fact is that interconnected networks existed before ARPANet (which was an epic failure, second only to MILNet) and that it was only an 11th hour demand that the government get the hell out of the way so commercial investment could rebuild the networks from scratch (using the IP protocol) that actually gave us the Internet of the 90s. The Internet we know today is almost completely a result of the failed interactive tv boom.
From a 1982 ARPAnet guide:
“It is considered illegal to use the ARPANet for anything which is not in direct support of Government business.”
and
“Sending electronic mail over the ARPANet for commercial profit or political purposes is both anti-social and illegal.”
Fast foward to Obama’s alternate universe and you get “Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.” – B. Obama
George T,
you can’t simply state facts and expect to b believed where Obumble is concerned. Who ‘gave’ you those facts? You didn’t get them on your own, so stop using them!
I baked a cake. I conceived the recipe, mixed the ingredients, heated the oven, filled the pan, timed the baking, put on the frosting, and sliced it myself.
But I can’t eat it by myself, because some guy a million years ago domesticated wheat, which becomes flour, without which a cake cannot exist. My cake is therefore a product of collective effort. It is therefore my duty to share my cake with all Americans.
Behold: the “reasoning” of the socialist douchebags who run our world.
And I can definitely believe that the socialist douchebags wouldn’t know that wheat was domesticated 7-10,000 years ago, not a million. Good verisimilitude.
Sure, they didn’t get there on their own. But almost all businesses got there by paying taxes out the nose too. More than the people who never got anywhere, that’s for sure.
What behaviors is he trying to encourage here?
He’s encouraging the Didn’t Succeeds to hate the Did Succeeds and get the first group to vote for a guy, himself, who will slap down, penalize and throttle the e-more-tal crap out of the second group, so the first group can feel better about themselves.
The problem is that in 21st Century America, it works all too often!
I suspected Obama didn’t understand trade, now he’s come out and admitted it. Sure, others help with education and creating businesses. They are also paid for this service at the time it was rendered. That’s call trade. You give me something, I give you something. What Obama wants is: the government gives us something, whether we want it or not; and we owe the government for the rest of our lives.
Dang! I thought with this many comments Bob-1 must be here, so I came prepared with a donut and coffee to enhance the experience. Let’s all say it together: “From each, according to…”
If the football team won the game, we usually congratulate the quarterback. But the quarterback didn’t do it all by himself. He had a team working with him, catching passes, blocking tacklers and playing defense.
Thus with business. The CEO plays an important role (unless you’re Mitt Romney, and then it’s just a paperwork thing) but everybody from the janitor to the IT guy has a role to play.
Pointing out that fact doesn’t mean the quarterback or CEO “didn’t deserve” a reward or that you “didn’t build your business.” It simply means that you didn’t get there all by yourself.
So the next time my team wins I should make sure to congratulate the beer vendor. Thank-you Chris.
So the next time I go to a football game and pay the $10 to park. I’ll tell the parking attendant to give some of his money to the Running Back I came to see. It’s the Chicago Way!
I’m afraid you have that exactly backwards. Without smart, hardworking individuals, who are willing to take a risk with their personal fortunes large and small, there would be no pool of resources for the gov’t to draw upon. Those who do take those risks are the backbone for the infrastructure maintained today, as well as that which is to come.
The more you place obstacles in their path, play down their initiative, hard work, and smarts, tax them into submission, and generally treat them with disdain, the less productive they will be. And once that is accomplished, you can kiss your infrastructure good-bye.
This quote by Robert Heinlein seems appropriate:
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.”
It’s funny how President Obama recently mentioned our “bad luck” as one of the reasons for our tough economic slog. Though, I am not laughing.
The comment by Chris is somewhat more fair than that.
“”Pointing out that fact doesn’t mean the quarterback or CEO “didn’t deserve” a reward or that you “didn’t build your business.” It simply means that you didn’t get there all by yourself.””
I have sacrificed and struggled to build my business far more than anyone associated with it directly or indirectly and I fully intend to profit from the effort. It is not a solo effort, but it would not have happened if I had not had the desire and ability to work 80 hour weeks and put everything possible back into the business.
I did not interpret the comment as me having to recognize the efforts of, say, the DMV lady that gave 🙂 me my drivers license. I would quibble that the CEOs’ role is critical rather than just important.
He’s NOT talking about a CEO Chris. Because CEOs often get hired WAY after the company is up and running with 100 or a 1000 employees.
He’s saying the Wright Brothers, or Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, or Henry Ford didn’t ‘build’ their businesses. They had ‘help’ from someone.
Well even Obumble had teachers, yet, every time HE opens HIS maw, it’s all “I… I… I… ME… ME… ME…”, so he thinks HE created HIM!!! And he’s never created, started or run a business or paid a person to do “X” job. So I can see how HE considers HIM an expert. (or a God)
But there are plenty of people who start a business, through their OWN foresight, sans ‘help’. You don’t have to be THE person who created the ‘hamburger’, to open a burger restaurant Chris. Look at the three examples I gave. Who do Orville and Wilbur ‘owe’? God, Darwin or BIRDS? Who do Hewlett and Packard ‘owe’? Physicists, electrical and electronic pioneers, God or the Big Bang? Who does Ford owe? The guy who created the first wheel? The first guy to build an internal combustion engine? Or the first lazy bastard who didn’t want to walk to the store or work and ‘wished’ for a car?
Starting a business is about seeing a hole in the market, and filling it. And being successful is a matter of doing it sooner and or better than the next guy. Innovators pull ideas and products together that in many times are already in existence. But to consider it ‘help’ that I, for instance, use a cast iron pot to cook in, with a wooden paddle, to stir oil, sugar and popcorn to make kettle korn, because I didn’t create the iron, or cultivate the corn or sugar, or the peanuts for the oil, is just short sighted and stupid.
Who do I ‘owe’? The Indians [sorry, Native Americans for the hand wringers among us] who started growing corn, whoever cultivated sugar cane first, the iron age forgers who figured out how to cast the iron? The German immigrants who, evidently, created this treat in the 1800’s? Do I ‘owe’ the guy who built my equipment? Which one of the 10 or 12 guys who were selling the kinds of kinds of equipment, when I bought mine, do I owe?
I think Obumble, confuses, as do you evidently, ‘customers’, employees’, ‘parents’, ‘teachers’, ‘professors’, ‘bankers’ and ‘investors’ with the people who have ‘helped’ him get paid his entire life.
Contributors, donators and tax payers.
Chris, he’s just dead ass wrong this time. Did I say this time? I should have said again, or still. He hasn’t been right about business or the economy since he took over. This is just another example of his lack of understanding and knowledge of anything outside a college campus or a fund raiser / ‘community organizer’ position.
Who do YOU owe? Got a list or just one person? Two, three, five? How many. how few? Or like Obumble, are you the exception? Are you another, “I… I… I… ME… ME… ME…”, kinda guy? And remember, I threw out ‘customers’, employees’, ‘parents’, ‘teachers’, ‘professors’, ‘bankers’ and ‘investors’, and I’ll add ’employers’, because the business owners he denigrated don’t have employers, they are the employers. Because we’ve ALL had those, none of us springs from the ether as a whole entity.
So who do you ‘owe’?
Remember, Schtumpy, that this is Chris Gerrib you’re wasting time debating with: Chris Gerrib, brilliant exegete who recently explained to us that when his hero told Joe the Plumber “wealth is better when you spread it around,” he wasn’t talking about coercive wealth redistribution (because, you know, coercive wealth redistribution is NEVER part of Obama’s mind-set, or the agenda of the DNC/Thugocracy). No, Obama was simply discussing Christian philosophy with Joe, who no doubt appreciated the lecture.
I mean, this is Chris Gerrib, Schtumpy, the King of Denial* and creator of Gerrib’s Razor: which states that given two different interpretations of an Obama statement–one that jells with “Il Dufe’s” overall statist-collectivist philosophy and that of the party for which he is the standard-bearer; and an opposing interpretation that, however strained, stretched and far-fetched, shows the president as being less of a statist-collectivist than all his previous pontifications and pronunciamentoes show him to be–always choose the latter.
(Faithful water-bearer that he is, Gerrib was going to name it “Obama’s Razor,” after America’s historic first president from the New Party; but Obama, not understanding it or anything not being explained to him by his teleprompter, patted him on the head and said, “Ggood boy, Chris, but you take it! Go on, Chris, take it, take it! Oooh, thjat’s a good boy!”)
Schtumpy, I’m sure you suspect that when Obama was talking about “giving back,” he was softening up the Golden Goose prior to staling more golden eggs. But now, using Gerrib’s Razor you see that Obama was only suggesting to businesmen and entrepreneurs that they donate to their favorite charities. Glad I could straighten you out, Schtumpy.
*Which is, of course, not just a river in Egypt.
Bilwick1,
I knew all that going in and yet, I took time away from watching Looney Tunes on the CN to write that. But sometimes, oft times really & lately, I must yell the TRUTH even though I know the person to whom I’m yelling, has their fingers in the ears and their head up their…
well, Henry Ford didn’t invent the internal combustion engine, nor did he build all those cars himself. He also didn’t build the roads his customers needed to use their cars. The Wright brothers built on decades of research in aviation, and they attended public schools. I could go on, but somebody a long time ago said it better. “No man is an island. We are all part of the mainland. When the bell tolls, ask not for whom it tolls, for it tolls for thee.”
What exactly is your point? Everyone realizes that we drive on roads or that innovation exists. No one is saying that there should be no roads and that every idea must be 100% new. Remember that is the strawman part of Obama’s argument…
Obama is saying that successful business people only succeeded because of the help that government provides and not because of the work put in by a company’s founders. He not only dismisses the contributions of founders in starting companies but also of their contributions to society in providing jobs, goods, services, and shockingly taxes. He makes it sound as if companies don’t contribute, that they leech off society.
It is interesting that Obama seems to think that rich people were just lucky, already rich, or acted unethically to get their money. Maybe he thinks this way because these are the type of rich people he has been surrounded by and surrounds himself with, then thinks all rich people are like his friends.
Obama has only ever known the uber wealthy. He was raised by the VP of a bank in Hawaii. He went to the most expensive schools in the country. He has never had relationships with people who know how hard it is to take a business idea and implement it. He does have extensive relationships with people who get an idea and then pay someone else to implement it.
We’re wasting our time wodun. He’s brain dead. His hands just keep twitching on the keyboard so he can vote in November.
Chris, it’s true that Henry Ford didn’t invent the internal combustion engine, but the engines that had been invented were very unrefined and crude. The people who should’ve already invented better engines owe Henry Ford billions for their failure, laziness, and incompetence.
It’s also true that he didn’t build all those cars himself. He had to hire workers because Paul Milenkovic hadn’t invented industrial robots. I figure Paul owed Ford a couple hundred billion, at least.
And it’s true that he didn’t build the roads his customers needed to use their cars, which was a traditional province of government that held back his initital sales. I figure the US government owes him another couple hundred billion in losses for that one.
And it’s true that the Wright brothers had access to earlier research in aviation, but that research was sparse and pathetic, forcing them to build their own wind tunnel to collect data. I figure every public and private university in the US and Europe each owes the Wright Corporation a couple billion.
No man is an island, and every man that would be a continent should sue the living shit out of the slackers for not providing him with the tools he needs, when he needs them.
Aren’t imagined social debts and obligations fun? You can just make stuff up, assign guilt, allocate fairness, and demand reciprocity any way you want. In fact, given that leftists killed about 100 million people in the 20th century, and taking the airline valuation of a couple million dollars per life, every leftist owes the Tea Party about $10 million, payable with Visa, Mastercard, or Paypal.
And Steve Jobs didn’t exactly invent the personal computer. Heck, he didn’t even invent the Apple 1 or Apple 2, those were Steve Wozniak’s masterpieces. The thing is though, a company called Apple (the one that is flooding the world with iToys and driving the personal electronics market) would not exist today if it weren’t for Jobs. He had the drive and the vision to make it happen. He was the one who was able to convince other people to risk their money on what he and Woz were creating. He was the one who made the choices that turned the products the company made into things that consumers believed they must have.
No, he didn’t build the business on his own, but he didn’t with Obama’s help either.
Chris L,
you’re right about the difference in those two men. And in many cases there is a product person or group anf a business guy or group.
The McDonalds Brothers and Ray Kroc is a great example. It will be interesting to see where apple goes post Jobs.
Ford didn’t invent the internal combustion engine… [plus any number of similar examples]
Chris, the president and you are misrepresenting the way the world works. Isolated facts, no matter how true, do not an argument make.
The core of the issue is did a business person earn the rewards for their effort or did they somehow steal from others? Everything else is bullshit.
Internally, the company pays for everything. No theft there unless you would be kind enough to point some out.
Externally, the company overpays for everything. How could I make such a shocking statement? Well because it’s true. Only those that pay taxes paid for those external things. Guess who pays taxes in excess of the cost? Successful businesses. It certainly isn’t those that don’t pay taxes at all. Those businesses are already paying more than their fair share.
Obama is not just an idiot; He’s the king of the useful idiots.
You don’t believe me? Do people that don’t pay taxes benefit from infrastructure? Then logically, even if I didn’t already know business pays $70 for every $50 of benefits, I would know (and so should you) that those that pay are overpaying to include those that don’t.
It really isn’t complicated. It’s simple logic.
I once explained to scientist colleagues from Japan that in order to understand American culture, one had to understand American football.
There is a clear division of labor: You have the front lines, offensive and defensive, that represent the working class and the backfield, quarterback, running backs, wide receivers on offense, free safety on defense, representing the management class.
When your team is winning, the quarterback gets all of the credit. When the team is losing, the linemen all get blamed for not protecting the quarterback, who took his sweet time in finding an open receiver. I guess the only time the quarterback ever gets blamed is during overtime in a playoff game, where he throws a pass directly into free safety coverage (I am giving away that I follow the Packers).
But most importantly, when the game is in the final moments and a well-placed field goal kick could make the winning difference in score, the team calls upon the services of a person with special technical skills, most often a foreigner trained in soccer, which is a game the European and South American countries take seriously but for which there is little interest on these shores.
When the team is losing, the linemen all get blamed for not protecting the quarterback, who took his sweet time in finding an open receiver.
… and risks his health and career as a result.
Like I said, understand American football and you understand American business culture.
Heh, in Dutch we use the same word for “deserve” and “earn”, even though we’re not exactly known as free marketeers.
Obviously, the entire Dutch nation and culture isn’t as smart or nuanced as the one. You must bow down and donate; We make sure all your credit cards work on the internet. We only require your card number. No other data has to be accurate or correspond. Heck, just make up a number and hope it works.
MPM,
but the Dutch were once BIG business and free marketeers. Those word usages most likely holds over from that time. The Dutch East India Company was the first international corporation.
Without them, I can’t even figure what the Western World would look like. It would take one of the folks who write good Alternate History Stories to figure how or where our lives would be stunted, or grown.
I was going to say they may not be known for it now, but it’s in their DNA. I guess the question is “how much do we owe them?”
you didn’t get there all by yourself
This is a strawman. It has absolutely and completely nothing to do with the argument he’s actually making which is… no matter what you’ve already paid… we want more.
It’s pure thievery with a bogus argument. Juvenile thinking at it’s worst.
TANSTAAFL. Everything is paid for. America is now paying for electing these imbeciles.
I’m not alone. Ryan says it’s a strawman.
Today Obama is getting slammed by business organizations, not to mention Romney. As Ace pointed out, the top 1% of earners are the ones who paid most of the money for the government programs. I think Obama has already lost control of the narrative on this one.
There’s a discussion of this latest “Quotation from Chairman O” on the Ann Althouse blog* and this is my favorite comment (posted by “Tom From Virginia”:
“Let’s Play one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-others.
“President Jefferson: You shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread that it has earned.
“President Lincoln: ‘You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’ No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.
“President Kennedy: The rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God.
“President Obama: If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
*See
http://althouse.blogspot.com/2012/07/obama-is-channeling-elizabeth-warren.html
Didn’t you know? There are 6 degrees to Barack Obama’s government. There would only be 5 but it’s all George Bush’s fault.
If POTUS believes what he said, then I guess his next great leadership plan will be to send bills to Congress to modify patents and copyrights, so that everyone applying for a patent, for example, has to list as co-inventors their parents, every teacher they had, the designers and builders of all facilities and equipment they used to develop the patentable thing, and on and on. There’s no logical starting point to the trail of “debts” POTUS implies we owe to all those who in his world-view helped us achieve everything each of us has achieved.
I hope he puts his wallet where his mouth is and renounces sole ownership rights to his two autobiographies, and shares all past and future payments to him for those books with all his teachers, the people who made the paper, pens, typewriters, and computers he used to write those books, Rev. Wright, etc., etc. I am not holding my breath waiting for POTUS to do that.
But Obama doesn’t need to give his own money to teachers since he wants to make the government give them all of ours.
BlueMoon,
I wish I’d thought of that angle while I was screaming at my keyboard hoping Chris G could hear me.
I left this comment at the linked article:
“Obama seems to be saying that planners (meaning entrepreneurs in this context) play little to no role in building a business. The grunt labor isn’t enough. Someone has to have a vision for that which will bring in the customers. The best labor force in the world will not make a crap product successful.”
Okay so what the president said certainly came out wrong (at least I hope he wishes he could reword it). I suspect the point he is making is that it is not about “paying back” as it is about “paying now & forward”. Meaning the state wants to tax and invest in current and future bridges, roads, airports, schools, technology so the children of this generation can start amazing businesses. I suspect strongly the president knows what it takes to start a business and make something happen and a large fraction of the credit goes to those on the “front-line”. Still they were helped by past investments (and present such as police) and it is reasonable to give some credit there.
This question of “credit” though is actually quite fascinating and has led to many debates on causality. I have always wondered if we really pay “full price” for what we have. Just as an example, lets pick a laptop computer. For $200 I can buy a very nice computer by say 2007 standards and lets say I make $10 an hour. For 20 hours of labor, I can own something that was never available to even the riches of kings 200 years ago. I wonder what they would have paid to just live in a society with air conditioning, antibiotics, computers etc? In a sense having all these options open to us is a product worth paying for that we simply inherit from the past work of others. Now this chain goes on and on, every time I use calculus, Newton is there……even something so simple as a pen contains ink, plastic all things carefully developed over time… Even politically….. freedom was won by our ancestors and we get those benefits today.
The point of all of this is that even projects that seem to be independent are most likely “semi-team” projects where those team members contributions are essentially a public good. As I said before, I suspect the president knows full well that those implementing those public goods and creating new ideas, better products etc deserve the star credit, but one can’t neglect all the pieces.
Now quantifying this whole “credit chain” should be left to the economists 🙂 Also this is not a justification or argument for more or less government. It is theoretically possible that a very market driven world could create a lot of these public goods. At present though, the government has largely made many of the long term investments which is impractical for most private industries. Until someone thinks of something clever and implements it, it is sensible to continue government investment in the present and future public goods to make it possible for all of to be richer and better off. The question as I always say, is “how much”? Clearly too much is bad but there is a middle ground which is optimal.
Best, Alex
How many times does Obama have to say stuff like this before people believe that is what the greatest orator in the history of the world meant what he said?
Well, that is the rub. No one is saying the government shouldn’t help with R&D like DARPA but one guy keeps saying his political opponents don’t want R&D, teachers, firemen, roads, clean air, clean water and that they want kids to starve and old people to die in the street.
How can you get to the middle ground when a person says they don’t think Obama’s favorite bundler should get hundreds of millions for a business that just about to go bankrupt and then Obama says, “What, you want kids to die from dirty air? You want the world to end in a fiery apocalypse?”
This is Level 1 Democrat Idiot-Excusing: “You obviously misheard the great wisdom of the Master. When he said that black is white, he didn’t say that black was white.”
Level 2, of course, is already present in this comment section: “But when The Master spoke, he was correct- black is indeed a form of white! How can this be doubted?”
AB,
much of what you said is true. But we’ve all worked for great bosses who can get wonders of workload or product improvement out of a decent group of employees not superior employees, but decent. And we’ve all worked for terrible bosses who couldn’t get Einstein, Newton and Hawking to come to the conclusion that 2 + 2 = 4. You know these folks,
“…couldn’t lead Starving Wolves to fresh meat.”
So, IMHO, there is a ‘spark’ or ‘smartness’ about some business owners and bosses that others just don’t have. No one does it alone for sure, but there is a segment of the population has the knack of doing things better, smarter, cheaper, quicker, or who can just chose a group of people out of the prospective new hire pool because they ‘see’ something in them.
That person IS doing it ‘on their own’, in the sense that not every boss / business owner has the spark. And they sure as hell aren’t relying on the Employment Office or the Dept. of labor to ‘issue’ them employees. They aren’t waiting for the Dept of the Interior or Commerce to tell them what to make or where to get the raw materials.
Obumble was beating that same old drum of haves and Have Nots. Go back and listen to the crowd response. There are distinct voices there. The one that stands out in my mind is a AA Woman, yelling “…yeah!”.
And that’s who he’s playing to. Minorities who already have a ‘you owe me’ attitude.
what the president said
Is pure bullshit. He said business do not earn their rewards. He’s calling them thieves so he can justify stealing more from them.
You can’t spin this.
By this logic, future generations owe an immense debt to their ancestors for everything they will have. Looked at this way, the fraction of national debt they will inherit upon birth makes perfect sense. And, as long as more children are on the way in the future, it makes sense to keep piling debt on our great-grandchildren, as a monetary representation of the debt they owe their ancestors. Of course it won’t be their ancestors being paid, because if they (we) were being paid by those future people, we wouldn’t have national debt. Yet another reason not to build a time machine…
And with the logic, I guess all American Olympic medal winners should refuse their rewards and demand that their primary school gym coach receive the medal. After all, they didn’t win those medals on their own.
Actually, it’s worse than that. Demanding that the gym coach from ten years ago get the medal would at least be recognizing some individual’s accomplishment. Obama’s statement is closer to demanding that the school board get the medal- and the endorsement contrats.
All the lefts arguments are the same. State something that sounds good. Attack anybody that doesn’t fall in worship of the sound good statement.
Green stands for envy.
On a lighter note:
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/07/17/barack-obama-the-great-demotivator/
Meanwhile–apparently not aware of Gerrib’s Razor–Stephen Green of Vodkapundit translates the latest Quotation from Charman O in a very succinct fashion: “Your money isn’t yours, either–now gimme.” (See http://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2012/07/16/all-your-base-are-belong-to-us-2/)
Also, related:
http://dailycaller.com/2012/07/17/obama-goes-telepromptless/
An inevitable conclusion that flows from Obama’s argument is that most foreign countries should be paying huge taxes to the West, and especially to the US, as a debt they owe us for just about everything they use, like AC electricity, lights, electric motors, telephones, radio, television, cars, airplanes, computers, anitbiotics, etc. Second and third world countries had help, lots of it, from things invented in Western Europe and North America, and by gosh, they should send us more money!
Gee, I don’t think Obama is smart enough to realize his redistributionist socialist debt theory means foreign ai should be poor countries paying rich countries.
They still owe us for the Marshall Plan and the polio vacciene.
But then we’d owe them for paper, gunpowder, algebra, agriculture, walking upright, ….
Paper beats “saving the world from economic desolation” and “defeating one of the world’s most frightening diseases” in your world, Jim. Nice to know.
Norman Borlaug called- he wants to know where your check for “Agriculture” is. He also said to tell the Third World they owe him too.
And “walking upright”? I’ll let the silliness of that comment stand on its own.
Those are old technologies. How much revenue did the black powder industry make last year? Modern paper was invented in France. Papyrus and parchment are tiny niche markets, at best. The entire algebra industry is a couple websites that help students cheat on algebra problems. If we can narrow down were walking upright evolved, we’ll know who to sue for back pain. As for agriculture, don’t you read Rands posts on eating paleo?
Because the State has taken upon itself to do A, B and C (roads, et al), statists now want to argue that gives the State the right to do D, E, F , G, etc., etc. et al. “We took your money to build A, you used A while you were building your business, so now we have the right to take even more of your money (and your liberty). That’s Statist Logic. Paraphrasing Clemenceau, it is to real logic what military music is to music. Trust Jim to use it. He’s got the Mailed Fist of Der Staat so far up his rectum he can taste Rustoleum.
If I’d had a great teacher in my life, he wouldn’t have sounded like Obama.
Wodun, Fair point about government spending on R&D and the like. As I said, the question is about how much to tax and where the money should be spent.
Davep, Watch it……I said I suspect the point he is making……I have never met him and had a good one-on-one conversation so my interpretations of his speeches are a “best guess”. For what it is worth, Romney said something of the effect during the primaries that he “likes being able to fire people” to paraphrase since I don’t recall the exact words. This was taken as him being a predatory capitalist into kicking people from their jobs…..In my interpretation he was trying to say he wants the American tax payer to have choices and competition in the marketplaces for the products and services they buy. I do not uniformly support one candidate or another, I am just trying to bring some optimism into his comment.
Der Schtumpy, I hear what you are saying about bosses and talent. No doubt some people are more effective than others. My point still holds though that even these bosses are living in a modern-industrialized world where they received a lot of benefit from public goods. I think the “accounting” of all of this is quite complicated though I have some ideas. Regardless I am a believer in crediting those that pushed things forward when they could easily have not etc. On many projects it is obvious who those people are, at least has been my experience.
Ed Minchau, Leland, DaveP. George Turner, The point again of this is not a “pay back” mentality. That would lead to soviet style repression and not letting anyone leave their country since they “owe something back”. For starters even if by some calculus people did owe back, they were never given the choice to grow up without the public goods so any notion of “back pay” seems unreasonable to me. The point is to recognize that in the modern industrialized world there are public good which permeate the environment which we utilize all of the time. This does make our accomplishments a “team effort” in some regards. I think it is important to acknowledge that so we can make the right investments towards the future and present.
Also in this analogy to sports. Of course that gold medal athlete deserves most of the credit but in the hypothetical example it is reasonable for a portion of their winnings to go towards maintaining tracks, sports education, R&D for athletics etc. Even if they used purely private money, they were likely motivated by competitors who did receive public goods and hence they got something….The question just becomes how much is fair and reasonable.
Anyway I am not trying to make an argument in a liberal or conservative way. Many things the government does are public bads and many things companies do are public goods. I just think it is naïve to think our accomplishments are solely the result of our hard work and labor. In my calculus I think the majority of credit does belong to those on the “front line” but just not all.
Best, Alex
I’d buy that he was appealing to Keysenian believers except for the part where he says: If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.
That’s not Keysenian. So, who is the somebody? Who created that business, if not the entrepreneur?
Businesses existed long before the internet, long before the Interstate Highway System, long before Edison pushed alternating current. Now there was a time when in order to get a franchise of any type, you had to kiss a sovereign’s ring, but many fought against that notion. I see no appeal in going back to that model.
If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that.
With more context:
The “that” that “you didn’t build” is “this unbelievable American system”.
Who created that business, if not the entrepreneur?
Exactly — stripped of context, the statement makes no sense. The entrepreneur created the business. Lots of other people created the “unbelievable American system” that the business exists in. It’s an utterly banal observation.
It’s not banal at all, it’s revealing. He’s saying if you’ve got a business, you didn’t build the roads and bridges that are required for the business to operate. In fact that’s EXACTLY what you did. Without the taxes that you and your employees pay there would be no roads or bridges. That simple fact flies over Obamas head.
Without the taxes that you and your employees pay there would be no roads or bridges. That simple fact flies over Obamas head.
Your timeline is confused. The infrastructure has to be exist before the new business makes any profit or pays any salaries that can taxed.
My business depends on the Internet, but it was founded long after tax dollars funded the invention of TCP/IP, DNS, RIP, etc. The taxes that I pay today are funding infrastructure that will prove just as necessary to people starting new businesses years and decades from now.
Jim, I already addressed your comment. The things Obama claimed were created to allow business to succeed; they didn’t exist prior to many businesses. But I agree with you, Obama’s observation is utterly banal.
they didn’t exist prior to many businesses
And businesses created without those things would be sitting ducks in today’s economy. The standards for success don’t stand still.
And here we go again: “When The Master said that balck was white, he was speaking a deep truth that you proles just can’t understand!”
Jim’s quote of Obama:
“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.”
Jim it’s really very simple to see the stupidity of Obama’s statement. There are at least 2 ways:
1) Ok take any starting point you want..name any set of human-created technologies that exist.
Now take ONE away…..
In that situation there will still be some people who take what is, and builds huge wealth from it.
Keep taking one away until ALL you have is a naked population sitting in a field….
i.e there are no prior inventions….
SOME of those people are going to figure out how to survive in relative comfort. SOME are going to thrive. SOME are going to end up very wealthy relative to the masses seated on that plain.
It might mean they have to hunt dangerous animals.
Do you see? It’s all about the person who thinks, struggles, risks works.
Or another way of looking at it:
Just because the internal combustion engine exists, does NOT guarantee anyone will design a working, economical car around it. Furthermore, in order to be economically successful that person is going to have to risk a LOT…money, reputation, and THE MOST VALUABLE thing we each have:
time
and there are no guarantees.
To minimize that person’s risk and struggle…to cheapen and toss it away as nothing…is incredibly ignorant.
cheapen and toss it away as nothing
Where does Obama do that?
Carl Sagan observed that to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. The universe is a necessary pre-condition. But it isn’t sufficient — someone still has to actually make the pie. Sagan isn’t cheapening the work of the baker by reminding us of everything else that is required.
If you actually read Obama’s speeches you discover that he routinely praises entrepreneurs and business owners up and down; without them we wouldn’t have any businesses. To also point out the necessary pre-conditions — society, infrastructure, laws, security, etc. — takes nothing away from the essential role played by businesspeople.
If you actually read Obama’s speeches you discover that he routinely praises entrepreneurs and business owners up and down; without them we wouldn’t have any businesses. To also point out the necessary pre-conditions — society, infrastructure, laws, security, etc. — takes nothing away from the essential role played by businesspeople.
You might not realize this, but the US Presidency is not about giving good sounding speeches. It’s also about actions. Obama suffers greatly from the says-one-thing-does-another character flaw, perhaps the worst case of such that has ever been in the US presidency. Also, Obama has this tax-the-rich thing going on and it’d be foolish to take his comments above in a vacuum, without considering what actions they’re a rationalization for.
Jim, Carl Sagan might think you have to create the universe to create an apple pie, but I doubt that anyone who bakes pies gives Obama crredit for inventing the universe.
Nor are roads and bridges a sufficient reason to raise taxes, seeing how we only spent $41 billion on maintenance and new construction in 2010, which is about a penny on the dollar of goverment spending.
I wrote:
” ….cheapen and toss it away as nothing
and Jim asks:
“Where does Obama do that? ”
Right here:
“If you have a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
Notwithstanding all the tortuous spin and twisting to obfuscate a very clear sentence, and very clear intent.
Jim,
they’re spinning that crap in the WH too, and I’m not buying it from them either.
Unfortunately, BHO is a campus, parlor room, cocktail party socialist. His own words, books and history show that he has never made a burger, dug a ditch, run a machine, cut grass or filed paperwork for $$$$. He doesn’t ‘get’ the private sector, and at 51, Jim, he’s not gonna get it.
He needs to go back to a campus.
“Many things the government does are public bads and many things companies do are public goods.” * And vice-versa…forgot to mention that.
-Alex
I notice Obama never turns this argument around. He talks about how much we owe because of the people who support us and not a bit about the opposite. How much are we owed by people who hinder or harm us? Such as Obama? He’s saying here that we get to mooch off of your success. I never hear him say we need to cough up some dough for your failure.
In my view, when success is punished, which is a possibility given Obama’s rhetoric, failure becomes the norm. If one wants more success, one has to accept that not everyone is going to be compensated fairly for their effort in creating other peoples’ success.
when success is punished
Romney pays 14% of his income in taxes. That’s punishment?
failure becomes the norm
We had higher economic growth, not failure, when top tax rates were much higher.
If one wants more success, one has to accept that not everyone is going to be compensated fairly for their effort in creating other peoples’ success.
The trend over the last 40 years has been towards slower growth and greater inequality. Do we want to go even further in that direction?
The trend over the last 4 years has been to even weaker growth and record inequality. I agree Jim, we do not need to continue in that direction. We tried it your way and you got ARRA. We’ve been tracking the results.
Romney pays 14% of his income in taxes. That’s punishment?
Obama isn’t speaking merely to hear himself speak. There is a point to that rhetoric, raising taxes for the people who actually create jobs, assets, and value in the US.
So he is proposing raising taxes on people like Romney with the justification being that other people are responsible for Romney’s success, hence, the federal government should tax him more. This incidentally is an argument that scales to any level of taxation since it doesn’t matter to what degree Romney got help from other people. Once he has the taint of others’ help, an arbitrarily high level of taxation is justified.
There may well be good reasons to raise taxes on the rich, or lower them on everyone else, but doing so (without regard to degree) on the basis that a rich person got help at some point? It shouldn’t be hard to see that statement is a load of bull.
We had higher economic growth, not failure, when top tax rates were much higher.
I’m pretty sure we’ve already corrected you on this myth. Top tax rates were much higher, but there were readily available tax loopholes, such as trusts, to avoid paying those kinds of tax rates. In other words, effective tax rates were much lower and probably little different than today.
The trend over the last 40 years has been towards slower growth and greater inequality. Do we want to go even further in that direction?
I too am concerned. But obviously we differ on what we think is the cause and effect. I see Obama’s policies as contributing to this effect rather than helping. The real problem is simply that it’s increasingly not cost effective to employ people in the US for a lot of work. 40 years of poorly thought out regulation and such is partly to blame, excessive spending by the federal government is partly to blame, and even pathological treatment of rich people is partly to blame.
Just because you are aware of an effect, here, a decline in the fortunes of the US, doesn’t mean that you understand why that effect happens.
The trend over the last 40 years has been towards slower growth and greater inequality.
There’s another trend in place; the percent of the population that doesn’t pay anything. Currently approaching 50%. What do you think lies at the end of THAT road?
the percent of the population that doesn’t pay anything. Currently approaching 50%.
Check your facts. Virtually everyone pays something. The handful who don’t are elderly, impoverished, and/or disabled. What exactly do you want from them?
If everyone paid something virtually, at least we’d have a base of operations. But we don’t even have that.
Indeed, Jim is wrong. The dole is not taxed. Even if you pay a pittance in sales tax for your Big Macs, the effect is simply that of getting less from the government. To be taxed, you must produce, otherwise you’re just passing the buck.
Um Jim, when I said Democrats were lying about “Free Healthcare”; you told me I was wrong. Now you are saying everyone pays something? You seem to have a hard time keeping facts straight. It’s like you make up this stuff to suit your needs of the moment.
And Jim, if society deserves a larger than present share of our successes, then shouldn’t it also pay a larger share of the successes it prevents?
Indeed.
shouldn’t it also pay a larger share of the successes it prevents?
Society already pays when success is prevented. If a business fails, because of inefficient regulation, or a poor education system, or wasteful litigation, or insufficient infrastructure, everyone loses out. The bigger share of success that society needs (and an aging population requires a bigger share), the more it depends on the success of new enterprises.
Society already pays when success is prevented.
And is that payment enough? I don’t think it is.
If a business fails, because of inefficient regulation, or a poor education system, or wasteful litigation, or insufficient infrastructure, everyone loses out.
Not the people who implement the inefficient regulation or profit from it. Please recall, for example, that regulation, especially, inefficient regulation, has economies of scale. The bigger your business, the more barriers to entry in the form of inefficient regulation you can endure. That in turn can give you considerable market power.
Jim, this is yet another example of the remarkable blindness you have for conflicts of interest.
The bigger share of success that society needs (and an aging population requires a bigger share), the more it depends on the success of new enterprises.
So when is society going to act like it needs what it needs?
The trend over the last 40 years has been towards slower growth and greater inequality.
Tax rates are a red herring. Regardless of the rate, behavior makes it about 20%. So any deviation from that rate is going to be less efficient. But the real problem is regulation and uncertainty.
Uncertainty is this idiot president of ours saying people don’t earn what they get. Yes, that is projection because politicians steal from us constantly using the buddy system.
An unidentified somebody did pay for it. Paying 70% of the cost and getting 50% of the benefit means they overpaid for it.
TANSTAAFL strikes again.
Gee, Ken, it almost sounds like you’re advocating some kind of flat tax, thus allowing the population to wean themselves of cannibalism. But…what would politicians then do? Won’t someone think of the politicians? /hellenlovejoy
Tax rates are a red herring.
So why is the #1 GOP priority keeping them low?
Regardless of the rate, behavior makes it about 20%.
Hardly. Look at George Romney’s returns — he released a dozen years of them. He was paying 37%. His son paid 14% (in the one year for which he released a partial return). Effective tax rates for the wealthy are near an all-time low.
So why is the #1 GOP priority keeping them low?
You’re asking me the motivation of others?
That 20% comes from a chart posted by Rand quite some time ago. Argue with him. Of course, it all depends on what taxes you’re talking about. However, the basic thought is correct…
Change the tax rate and you change behavior. Would you like to argue about that?
The problem is government spending. The problem is the knowledge problem. The problem is every dime spent by the government takes away personal spending from somebody taxed.
The problem is Obama is an economic imbecile and those that don’t know that are the bigger part of the problem.
Obama isn’t talking about raising Rommey’s taxes to 14% he is talking about raising them to ??? whatever “fair share” means. Leftests keep talking about the higher rates post wwii, so maybe a 70-90% taxe rate but Romney is one of a small group of people who are super wealthy and all of tbeir income comes from investments, which are already taxed twice. That 14% doesn’t count the taxes already paid by companies.
Let’s also not forget that we were the only industrialized country after wwii that wasn’t destroyed by the war. That had more to do with our success than tax rates.
The couple hundred people who live like Romney are a subset of a larger group who rely on investment income, retirees. This is the part where if I was a progressive, I would ask why you want to steal money from the elderly so they would have to choose between food and medicine and then get kicked out on the street because they can’t pay their mortgage where they starve to death. Why do you want old people to.starve to death?
I have never seen a proposal that would only target the couple hundred super wealthy and exempt the elderly.
Increasing taxes on investment income wont be enough to knock down the deficit, so what is its purpose? These proposals are motivated out of hatred and envy. Progressives want to punish other people to make themselves feel better despite their tax the rich plans not actually providing any significant benefits to society and in the words of Obama, if the taxes actually hurt the economy it’s ok because it will be more fair.
Fear, envy, hatred, and racism are the platform of the Democrat party for.this election. Obama sure has changed a lot from his speeches before becoming president or maybe he can no longer hide his true self…
Increasing taxes on investment income wont be enough to knock down the deficit, so what is its purpose?
So any policy proposal that falls short of eliminating the entire deficit must have an ulterior motive?
At some point we’ll need to reduce the deficit, at least as a percentage of GDP. None of the ways to do so are pain free, so we’ll have to prioritize. I’d rather have rich investors like Romney (and myself) pay 39.6% on investment gains, than cut Medicaid, public health, infrastructure, research, Social Security, etc.
At some point we’ll need to reduce spending. Let’s start with the ATF, GSA parties in Las Vegas, Secret Service advance teams, TSA body scanners, and DeptEd. That’s not enough either, but there’s no ulterior motive right? It’s just a policy proposal!
Interest rates are already negative in Europe. The motive behind this is purely ideological.
Jim’s red herring/strawman:
“So any policy proposal that falls short of eliminating the entire deficit must have an ulterior motive?”
You have had demonstrated to you countless times what impact taking 100% of all the rich people’s money would have on the deficit/debt.
Insignificant.
The DAMAGE that would cause to the economy and therefore tax receipts is enormous. Not just the physical taking of a person’s property (though that’s horrible enough), and not just the reduction in the economy that would directly cause (removing demand which the libs harp on so much)………
but on the psychological effect of the people in the nation. Who is next?
Yeah Jim it is, when my wife and I pay more than that and my ‘paycheck is a whopping $14k a year in SSD. I pay 10% on SSD for crying out loud!!! So he make MOUNDS more money than me and pays 4% more? AW, that’s BS. He’s a hypocrite!
He wants to say the rich should pay more, yet he takes EVERY loop hole out there. He could skip them, use JUST the tax table and pay 33% or 35%. And you’re going to say they need to be closed. BFD, if he takes, he’s as ‘guilty’ as Romney or any other Republican. It’s always fat cat bankers and Wall Street. how about fat cat actors and Hollywood!?
If his ire is at rich people, he needs to go spit in a mirror FIRST, THEN go after the rest of America!
Also, note how Obama flat-out lies again by saying that he didn’t raise taxes on the middle class despite the fact that Justice Roberts has declared the 2.5% ACA penalty exactly that.
Robert said that the mandate was only constitutional under the government’s taxing authority. He was the only justice, out of nine, to draw that conclusion. The fact that one justice considers the no-insurance penalty a tax, for the purposes of establishing its constitutionality, doesn’t make it one.
No, it actually does. If it were not a tax, the law would be invalid.
Further, an unfunded spending mandate is basically a tax, too. It’s a tax both legally and economically.
Lost in some of this; there was a time when things like roads and bridges, when built by governments, were local and state concerns. Just like education used to be local and state concerns. Just like healthcare used to be local and state concerns. Nationalization of these industry smacks of similar efforts almost a century ago.
were local and state concerns
Technological progress happens. There’s no point in local Internet policy, any more than there is in local aviation policy. Successful companies like Walmart and Apple have figured out how to manage operations all over the globe from a central headquarters; the U.S. government should as well.
Technological progress happens.
Apparently political progress actually regressesses. Why Jim, do you want to try fascism again?
If you don’t like being called a fascist, try this then; why do you want to create barriers to small business in favor of large corporations like Walmart and Apple, who send much of their production work overseas?
Because they’re the lawyer party.
Big companies are big targets. Small companies are barely worth suing. Big companies are therefor obviously easier to control… wait. Were we talking about fascism?
Ah, that explains why education has gotten so much better since the DOE. Oh, wait… Damn that socialist calculation problem, always rearing its ugly head…
Technological progress happens.
Yet government hasn’t changed. We’re still kicking around organizations that do old-fashioned “art” or check for naughty words on the radios. Actual technological progress happening would actually be an argument against keeping such functions with staid bureaucrats.
There’s no point in local Internet policy
What a weird statement. I guess all those network managers around the world should be fired then.
any more than there is in local aviation policy.
ATCS have to go too then.
The U.S. government should [manage operations all over the globe from a central headquarters].
Revealing your Stalinist inclination to worship an ideology that has never worked everywhere it’s been tried [and never will.]
Even the military doesn’t do that. It is a hierarchy of command, but it is never ever centrally managed. It is managed by field commanders. Viet Nam is an example of using your approach.
If you’re having trouble understanding: I’m not saying their should never be central policy. I’m saying it should bow to the reality of the knowledge problem (which doesn’t go away no matter what real or imagined knowledge the central authority has.)
“Revealing your Stalinist inclination to worship an ideology that has never worked everywhere it’s been tried”.
Just pointing out that government is NP-Hard.
The original Traveling Salesman problem itself is an example of ‘Centralized Control’. The fact that it experiences combinatorial explosion and grinds to an incomprehensible jumbled halt in the mere tens-of-thousands is typical. Hiring 10,000 salesmen and just saying “Go!” works somehow, but planning from the center does not. And has been mathematically proven to not work even remotely under ideal circumstances. And that’s before you add in the minor details of greed, pride, sloth, lust, and, you know, people.
Don’t confuse them with facts, Al. 😉
You can lead a lefty to Hayak, but you can’t make them think (although they do think they think.)
It’s the same reply made to Jar-Jar regarding his ability to speak.
Page One, Chapter Nine:
“He didn’t invent iron ore and blast furnaces, did he?”
“Who?”
“Rearden. He didn’t invent smelting and chemistry and air compression. He couldn’t have invented his Metal but for thousands and thousands of other people. His Metal! Why does he think it’s his? Why does he think it’s his invention? Everybody uses the work of everybody else. Nobody ever invents anything.”
She said, puzzled, “But the iron ore and all those other things were there all the time. Why didn’t anybody else make that Metal, but Mr. Rearden did?”
h/t Glenn. “For Obama, Atlas Shrugged isn’t a cautionary tale, it’s a how-to manual.”
Brilliant Curt, simply brilliant!
The most cogent, on point, targeted comment in this thread. Would that I had thought it up, I’d be bragging for a week.