“Government is the root of American success” is what Dr. K. says Obama’s philosophy is all about. Will it take Obama bringing Che Guevara and Mao Zedong posters to his rallies for the pundits and chattering classes to state the obvious – that The Messiah is as anti-American as any dictator in Cuba, Russia, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela or Iran? Nanny state socialism brings out the worst in people, however, the Constitutional principles of Liberty embraced by Americans have resulted in the America being the, ”exceptional,’ country which it is in that it encourages the best in people. This nation promises you nothing but the chance to be successful based on hard work, ambition, know-how, initiative and some luck – which is the traditional all-American can-do spirit of optimism which this country is known for!
Last night on the Fox All Stars Dr. K. said this:
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: That is the process but the content here is utterly damning. I mean, Romney said it’s not a gaffe. A gaffe defined in Washington is when a politician accidentally speaks what is really in his heart. This is his political philosophy. And it’s elaborated. I don’t care about that one sentence, al though I would say I disagree with Steve [Hayes] that one sentence as I just heard it, and as anybody looking at it would see in print, that you build, ‘that’ is a reference to person’s idea he built his own business. It is not a reference to roads and bridges.
But let’s look at the whole context and let’s ignore that one sentence. He starts with a mocking reference to people who succeed believing it might have something to do with intelligence or hard work. Sort of laughing at them.
So he is mocking people, a Korean immigrant who works 16 hours a day in a candy store and he builds it and he sends his kids to college with that, you know, with the money he finally makes 20 years later. Or a physician in medical school, you know, who goes 60 or 80-hour weeks, works hard and then in his 50s, begins reaping the rewards of his work. That is number one. Secondly, everybody he says who helped you along the way. It’s no accident everybody in his example is an agent of the government. It’s either a teacher, or a road, or a bridge, or the internet, which he says incorrectly was invented by the government so we could create opportunities in the marketplace.
It’s all government. And this is his philosophy that government is the root of the success, individual and national and it’s not individual enterprise — he has to some extent to individual enterprise. But anybody who thinks it’s that, obviously is rewarding himself in a way that is undeserved, it’s the government. And that’s the heart of his philosophy. That is the real real division between left and right in the country. That’s why Romney ought to hit it everyday until election day.
by Charles Krauthhammer
“If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
— Barack Obama,
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.
Obama’s infrastructure argument is easily refuted by what is essentially a controlled social experiment. Roads and schools are the constant. What’s variable is the energy, enterprise, risk-taking, hard work and genius of the individual. It is therefore precisely those individual characteristics, not the communal utilities, that account for the different outcomes.
[…….]
More nonsense. Infrastructure is not a liberal idea, nor is it particularly new. The Via Appia was built 2,300 years ago. The Romans built aqueducts, too. And sewers. Since forever, infrastructure has been consensually understood to be a core function of government.
The argument between left and right is about what you do beyond infrastructure. It’s about transfer payments and redistributionist taxation, about geometrically expanding entitlements, about tax breaks and subsidies to induce actions pleasing to central planners. It’s about free contraceptives for privileged students and welfare without work — the latest Obama entitlement-by-decree that would fatally undermine the great bipartisan welfare reform of 1996. It’s about endless government handouts that, ironically, are crowding out necessary spending on, yes, infrastructure.
What divides liberals and conservatives is not roads and bridges but Julia’s world, an Obama campaign creation that may be the most self-revealing parody of liberalism ever conceived. It’s a series of cartoon illustrations in which a fictional Julia is swaddled and subsidized throughout her life by an all- giving government of bottomless pockets and “Queen for a Day” magnanimity. At every stage, the state is there to provide — preschool classes and cut-rate college loans, birth control and maternity care, business loans and retirement. The only time she’s on her own is at her grave site.
[……]
Or to put it slightly differently, the “Life of Julia” represents the paradigmatic Obama political philosophy: citizen as orphan child. For the conservative, providing for every need is the duty that government owes to actual orphan children. Not to supposedly autonomous adults.
Beyond infrastructure, the conservative sees the proper role of government as providing not European-style universal entitlements but a firm safety net, meaning Julia-like treatment for those who really cannot make it on their own — those too young or too old, too mentally or physically impaired, to provide for themselves.
Limited government so conceived has two indispensable advantages. It avoids inexorable European-style national insolvency. And it avoids breeding debilitating individual dependency. It encourages and celebrates character, independence, energy, hard work as the foundations of a free society and a thriving economy — precisely the virtues Obama discounts and devalues in his accounting of the wealth of nations.
Read the rest – Did the state make you great?
Tags: Charles Krauthammer
