He built this...and what did government do but charge him a huge licensing fee and put him through red tape for permits. (C) Photo by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick
I was really annoyed with Elizabeth Warren's "you didn't build that" -- Ron Paul called her a "socialist" over this and I can understand why. Here's what she is quoted as saying in a video where she railed against "corporate welfare" and "tax cuts for the rich":
She said: "No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own -- nobody." She said even a factory owner who became wealthy used public goods like roads, police and fire, and public education. She added: "Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along."
Gosh, that's magnanimous, this "progressive" is willing to let a factory owner "keep a hunk" of his private property (!). But she's got the social contact all wrong. Factory owners don't "pay it forward". They pay "it" in the here and now in the form of taxes, and those taxes are used to build the roads and schools. Actually, school taxes come from property owners! If businesses uses roads or water, it's because they paid for them with taxes out of their income.
The Obama campaign seemed to have brazenly and boldly copied the idea from her deliberately, because they feel that they can prevail by being hard-lined, not by being accommodationist.
As the Christian Science Monitor reported:
President Obama’s statement, made at a campaign rally in Virginia last weekend, that “if you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen” provided an opening for the Romney campaign to hit the president at what they are presenting as his weakest spot – his failure to understand business and the economy.
The full quote:
"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, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together."
This "you didn't build that" and "social contract" stuff isn't quoted out of context or misconstrued; it's unabashed about insisting on the socialistic spin to American life that has been described by James Taranto as one of the "the two economies," i.e. the economy of the government, the municipal and state unions, and spending on social welfare, and the economy of business and wealth generation, which is supposedly divided between red and blue states and between Republican and Democrat. (In fact, whoever popularized the red/blue distinction deliberately made the Republicans red rather than the more socialistic Democrats so that there could be no reinforcement of any communist undertow.)
But...there is.
I always marvel at the taboo placed on talking about Obama's socialist thinking. As we know from Radical-in-Chief by Stanley Kurtz, Obama attended the Socialist Scholars' Conferences in the early 1980s which I also attended. So I know this line very well, and the line of the Democratic Socialists of America, the largest and most active socialist organization at the time. Obama spouts DSA rhetoric all the time, whether it's the "guns and religion" line of the Marxist" religion as the opiate of the people," whether it's the "no first use" of nuclear weapons concept, taken straight from the Soviet propaganda line of the 1980s, and of course the obsession with health care socialization.
That doesn't mean that he *is* a socialist, as in being literally a member of some actual or crypto-socialist organization or party. There's been an effort to show him as having joined the Working Families Party, and maybe he did -- and that is disturbing, because basically Working Families is a kind of political cult, using the various Bolshevik tactics to get in, such as the faddish "participatory budgeting" movement -- and of course, the very name of the party, to emphasize "work" and "family values," i.e. to play on the stereotype of welfare queens, even as they insert a socialistic message for how to run society. But Obama has been pretty careful to scrub his past of anything that could point definitively to him being any kind of trained socialist or communist operative, and that's why bloggers trying to portray him as one will always fail and always be labeled as "McCarthyites". The way to approach this is not in his ontological status, but his actual statements -- and how they resonate with socialist ideology.
Those who get their backs up when anyone tries to discuss Obama's socialist leanings and socialist and even communist influences try to insist on literalisms, like party membership or writings, or "counter-factuals," like the Obama Administration's efforts to "help to small business" or "Start-up America" or whatever. It doesn't matter. Obama comes from the community-organizing movement, and that is riddled with socialist concepts hiding out under plainer single-issue agendas because the cadres were always aware that they couldn't move the explicit full socialist agenda forward explicitly.
Now they feel they can, but they still cling to that stealth mode, where they try to keep the s-word out of the discourse, and discredit anyone who uses it.
The reality is, Elizabeth Warren's statement and Obama's later reiteration of it *are* socialistic statements. They are collectivist, state-tropic, and dismissive of the entrepreneur, the individual's hard work, and the concept of wealth distribution -- as opposed to wealth *generation*. They seek to club the business person over the head with some notion of social welfare that they believe is a priori to him as a role in society and which they believe is also a curb on his "excessive" profits which they imply "harm" society.
What I marvel at with the "you didn't build that" socialist rhetoric -- yes, it is socialist, and socialist in its envious and indignant class warfaring as well -- is that they can't see the obvious rejoinder to this socialism -- that businesses and individuals pay the taxes.
You didn't build that road literally ...because the government did...because the government collected *a part of your income as tax*. You didn't provide that water plant literally ... because the government did...because companies pay taxes, and that is used for infrastructure. Duh!
The government is the service organization that uses part of the wealth generated to provide these services, hopefully with liberal democratic oversight and regulation where required but not in excess.
But this perspective is completely jettisoned in the idea that first the state exists, with that tax revenue already collected -- and it doesn't matter how -- then that state dispenses goods to you as an individual or business.
It's really whack. The answer to the Obama campaign and Elizabeth Warren and the Marxist intellectuals pumping this statist ideology is to say this, about their vaunted state and its redistribution plans -- "You didn't build that."
But put it at the typical individual level. First comes my job -- and then my yielding of my taxes. My job is at a firm that makes widgets or provides services and generates revenue -- and pays me! It supplies the jobs! It pays payroll tax, and corporate taxes! Hello! THAT is what makes the government's treasure chest. Jobs provided by corporations. Not jobs provided by the state, which are using the taxes from the corporations, you know? Sure, there's a role for municipal jobs and government welfare, but it has reached the point where it becomes the ideological center of gravity without any awareness of where the money is going to come from.
The reason why socialist countries like Greece find it so hard to collect taxes is because those doing well avoid excessive taxation -- I remember very vividly an aereal photo that showed a landscape dotted with swimming pools -- and precisely because of the ordinary citizens' mindset that the government should just be supplying all this without getting in the way of any one individual's desire to hang on to his wealth. It's awful to see it play out. Socialism leads to collapse and crime, as it is doing now in Greece. Just because it didn't lead to collapse and crime in Sweden doesn't mean that isn't its nature -- as we have seen played out so many times.
The Democratic propagandists often spin a yarn about "corporate welfare" and "corporations that don't pay taxes" -- of course never talking about the fact that Google runs all its revenue through Ireland and other low-tax havens and doesn't bring that tax home to support America and its infrastucture. Yet it provides jobs and buys goods and services so I guess it's something the government lives with -- and how could it be otherwise in a free society with free enterprise? Capital goes to where capital can be maintained cheaply.
The reality is that most businesses aren't these mega corporations and pay their taxes. If they get a city or state incentive of some kind, a bond or whatever, it's because they are productive! They create jobs! They create useful products! Why can't the socialists see that?! They are so ideologically blinkered, they can't. Or won't.
Hence the attempt to smear some businesses of those who have stood up to this "you didn't build that" crap as having government contracts or government bonds. So what!!! What's the big deal! Good! That shows they are entrepreneurial in getting customers and getting funding. Obviously they pay it back.
Which can't be said about all those green projects and "green jobs" that Obama was funding out of Washington as the "stimulus".
For some reason, the obvious debate to be had here -- about how wealth generates wealth and that *is* what forms the tax base! -- just keeps getting dismissed or deliberately muted by the "progressives," hence they come up with stuff like "it's because he's black" and "it's racist" in trying to explain why this ad has become popular.
Of course, when Jonathan Chait writes about Obama speaking in a more "black dialect," you have to wonder who is the racist. I didn't pick that up and didn't know what he meant at first. But sure, if the opposition clip features all white people with their i-pads dismissing the president's "you didn't build that," it has to be "racism," right?
It could never be capitalism. Only racism!
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