House of Eratosthenes

Team Obama and all the little OFA lemmings are out in full force crying “context! context!” over Obama’s ridiculous comments last Friday. For the sake of sanity, and to provide you with an easy way to combat their latest attempt at damage control, here’s how Obama’s comments were wrong, no matter how you look at it.

First, the comments… in full context.

We’ve already made a trillion dollars’ worth of cuts. We can make some more cuts in programs that don’t work, and make government work more efficiently…We can make another trillion or trillion-two, and what we then do is ask for the wealthy to pay a little bit more …

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me, because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something – there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

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.

Obama’s first mistake was erecting a gigantic strawman to knock down…“Limited government” has never meant, nor does it mean now, “no government.” It’s a ridiculous argument used by those who wish to pretend that conservatives, who favor limited government, are really anarchists, who favor no government.

The second mistake was this notion that business owners (aka “the rich”) aren’t paying their fair share for the stuff tax payers pay for, like roads, bridges, etc…
:
The third mistake Obama made was revealing his government-centric view of the world. In his mind, government is the innovator and people simply do what the government instructs them to do. It’s profoundly unamerican. This country is great because of the ideals upon which it was founded: Life. Liberty. And the pursuit of happiness. Obama thinks that is only made possible by government. It’s exactly backwards.

There’s a very cool graphic to go with it, “People in this income group, make this much of the national income, and pay this much in taxes.” I’d embed it, but the exact numbers are likely to change while the overall trend is not so likely to change…

There is a certain symmetry that is lacking here. It has already been asked, repeatedly, who else might have “helped” in the case of businesses that were not so successful; is someone going to help that poor business owner as he deals with the resulting personal and/or business bankruptcy?

Liberals have such a funny idea of numbers. Ed Darrell, for example, is out there trumping up a purely emotion-driven argument in favor of foreign aid. His argument all comes down to, and I quote, “That’s a pittance.” Well, I’m not so much against foreign aid, so I shall not examine the merits of it (since he doesn’t) — I’m more interested in the argument resting entirely on the numbers, the numbers, the numbers, they should be higher, higher, higher. Ever try to corner a progressive on the other end of it, though — how much should the federal government be spending, on everything? Either in a net dollar amount, or per capita. How much is too much?

Quicker than you can say wham, bam, thank you ma’am…the numbers, the numbers, they lose all meaning.

In truth, the numbers never had anything to do with anything in the first place. This “Elizabeth Warren” part of modern liberalism, is just a well-organized and well-funded attack on individual accomplishment. This is why I think Obama’s third mistake was His biggest one; He tipped His hand.

One of my “Hello Kitty of Blogging” friends posted an Atlas Shrugged excerpt that concerns itself with this…oh yeah, probably not paying a decent respect to President Obama’s intended “context”…

“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?”

I think there is a Republican mole in Obama’s inner circle. This is devastating because it fits easily on a bumper sticker: “You Didn’t Build That.” And as an election-year issue, it is viable. Now we can have an election between the “Yes You Built That” people and the “You Didn’t Build That” people.

It’s so sad that, even with the conflict crystallized in those terms, the year-end outcome is still difficult to predict. Of course, there was difficulty involved in predicting 1980, and the difficulty proved to be illusory; perhaps that is the case here. If not, that’s a sign that we’ve lost our bearings. We really have that many voting people who are passionately stirred up against the understanding of human achievement, of identifiable people accomplishing things? That much enthusiasm for burying constructive work beneath a permafrost of anonymity?

Looks like we do have our election-year issue.

“Nobody ever invents anything.”

Wow, just wow. Not gonn’a bother to say anymore than that.
- tim | 07/19/2012 @ 09:14
This is simply what Democrats do – try to claim that it’s government, not free markets or freedom or innovators in private industry – that is responsible for America’s unprecedented success. You’d think that if having government referee the economy were all it takes, the Soviet Union would have been a big success story while the US went broke. But that’s not what happened, was it?

This is nothing new. Back in the 90s, Clinton was always talking about “government giving people the tools they need to succeed.” The man was such a skillful liar that I never knew for sure what he really did or didn’t believe, but I wrote back in college, “Like any good liberal, he has it exactly backwards.” It probably never even occurred to him that maybe it was the people who give the government the tools IT needs to succeed – they fund its operations and its powers derive from “the just consent of the governed.”

There is this constant idea that never seems to go away – that the common, ordinary citizens of some country always need to be shepherded or guided by some wise set of ruling elites. Never mind that this is the nation which bucked the norm of human history (the rest of which always went along with that model in some manner), and yet it’s the one which has left all the others in the dust in its wealth and standard of living.
- cylarz | 07/20/2012 @ 02:38
[…] Cylarz said under the other post I put up about this… This is nothing new. Back in the 90s, Clinton was […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 07/20/2012 @ 07:19
[…] Don’t Say at a Job Interview” “A Generation Awakens” Memo For File CLXII Wrong, “In Context” The Stick-Out Pockets Sticky Theory Five Ways Liberalism Destroys Virtue Peace and Quiet: Trigger […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 07/24/2012 @ 10:10
I’ve been hanging out here for quite a while this evening, and have linked several of your posts. Here’s one: http://bobagard.blogspot.com/2012/07/we-have-our-election-year-issue.html
- bob agard | 07/27/2012 @ 19:10

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Wrong, “In Context”Wednesday, July 18th, 2012

Wrong, “In Context”
Wednesday, July 18th, 2012