I woke up this morning to find that my Leftist friends literally plastered Facebook with the above poster. (Since I grew up and still live in the Bay Area, I have lots of Leftist friends.) If the text on the image is unclear, this is what it says:
There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you.
But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory. [Bookworm note: Warren must have made this statement before the Gibson Guitar factory raid, when marauding bands of government agents did precisely that to a factory that forgot to pay off the Democrats.]
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.
There are so many things wrong with Warren’s statement that I really don’t know where to begin. Tonestaple sent me an email that certainly gets the tone right (which led to my post’s title):
They [meaning the middle class Leftists who applaud the above statement] seem to think it is the ne plus ultra of common sense. I think it sounds like a gangster saying, “Nice factory you’ve got here – be a shame if anything happened to it.”
As my interlineation about Gibson Guitar shows, Tonestaple perfectly nailed the reality behind Warren’s cutesy, nursery school-esque, “God blessy” statement that everybody should share with everybody else.” The reality is that, in Obama world, if you don’t make nice with the government, the government is not going to make nice with you. (The cutesy tone, incidentally, is classic Warren. She was one of my law school profs, and I found her invariably sweet in word, unintelligible in substance, and vaguely vicious in action.)
Tone aside, there are two major problems with Warren’s factory parable. The first is the assumption that the factory owner contributed nothing to roads, education, police and fire forces, etc. In Warren’s world, the factory owner is a pure parasite. Warren conveniently forgets that the factory owner pays taxes (hugely more taxes than all those people whom she posits paying for roads, education, etc.); that the factory owner provides work for and pays the salary of those employees who then pay taxes; and that a successful factory owner makes a product that provides a benefit to people.
The second problem with Warren’s statement is actually a much more profound one than her “forgetting” that it’s the employers who provide the goods, services and salaries that make all those useful taxes possible. Warren’s statement turns the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and everything else the Founders stood for upside down.
In Warren’s world, a socialist world, the government owns everything. (And don’t you love it when well paid Harvard professors advocate socialism?) The Founders would have been horrified by Warren’s pronouncement. As their writings demonstrate, they believed that natural rights, the rights that ought to govern any righteous nation, mandate that ownership is vested in the individual. The government is merely a servant of the people. We, the people, pay its salary (taxes) so that it can provide services for us. That’s all.
You don’t have to go very far to understand that the Founders wouldn’t have agreed with Warren that the government allows people to own things, provided that they then make nice with the government. Our seminal document, the Declaration of Independence, spells out the master-servant relationship, and it is the people who are masters and the government the servant, not vice versa:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
These were the principles on which our nation was founded, and they provided the guiding paradigm for our Constitution. When my children ask me what the Constitution is, I have a very simple answer: It’s a contract under which the federal government promises to provide certain limited services for the American people and, further, promises not to abuse the power that the people hand the government to enable it to carry out those services. Elizabeth Warren clearly has no use for our nation’s contract.
Cross-posted at Bookworm Room
Without people with the guts and vision to build factories, we’ld all still be living in grass shacks.
Professor Warren would be foraging for nuts and berries if she wasn’t already be dead.
“In Warren’s world, the factory owner is a pure parasite.”
“In Warren’s world, a socialist world, the government owns everything”
Take that straw men!
“C”-word.
I suggest Ms. Warren try to live her life in a place of the kind she is describing: The People’s Democratic Socialist Republic of Korea. (If I got the name wrong, that’s OK – you get my drift.)
The problem that she seems to be passing over is that many of these functions, e.g. protection from marauding bands) could be better provided to factory owners by private contractors, leaving the rest of the country in a state of anarchy. To say that it is a private benefit that should be deserving of private funding by those who benefit directly contradicts her purported message.
She’s trying to say, “you, who have benefited beyond others, should pay beyond others” as if it were Marx’s “from each according to ability” — but what she ends up making a case for is, “you should get what you pay for, and no more.”
I can certainly see why you’d say, “…I found her invariably sweet in word, unintelligible in substance, and vaguely vicious in action.”
There is another problem with her statement: “You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. ”
It is not as if the consumer is sitting around saying “get your products off the road I paid for” rather when the consumer purchases the products he/she is also receiving benefits of the road system. Although the consumer is probably contributing less in sheer dollar amount overall, Warren’s argument assumes the consumer is paying for the roads and is completely a victim–paying more than their share without any benefits. The fact is the consumer has an equal interest and benefit in having good roads because the better the roads the more opportunity for diverse products, the more the price stays down.
I repeat: the consumer has an important interest in having good roads as much as the producer.
The real parasites are people like Warren. The creators/entrepreneurs and those who work for them or with them have provided such a prosperous society that the likes of Warren, union bosses, activists and other people of teriary “value,” can suck blood out of the working beast and think they’re doing it a favor.
And, I will add, Warren is a prime example of the soft despotism that either C.K. Chersterton or C.S. Lewis warned us about.
I wrote a response to the first entry on this topic, so I will try not to repeat myself.
This impudent Dragon Lily is a twit. The roads and police and bridges were paid for by HALF of us, because 47% aren’t doing the heavy lifting of that particular burden.
And the fact that leftists are putting this poster up simply highlights the notion that a fool and their monkeys are not soon parted.
And what she’s implying is that the 47% who don’t pay taxes are to be the secondary beneficiaries of what the taxpayers shell out. The primary beneficiaries are the officious pricks like Warren who insinuate themselves into the process.
Scott Brown ought to have a field day with her.
We’ll soon discover how well the people of Massachusetts understand history as created in their own back yards.
Great post! Thanks for the contrast in principles.
I submit Warren’s rationale is easily appropriated and thus, arguably applicable for those on the public dole or those otherwise deemed society’s non-contributors. If the factory owner is, per Warren, obligated to “pay forward” for the next generation then society’s non-productive members too, must logically have an identical obligation–her precept, after all, is that the factory owner is a nothing more than a “taker”. Would/does she argue that non-contributors are not also members of society and who have not also benefited from societal investment(s)? Have they not also been provided education, roadways to traverse, fire and police protection and innumerable other public services? Since this group has indeed benefited, then Warren’s argument must logically impose an equivalent moral/ethical duty on the non-contributor in order to perpetuate societal support and advancement. Put another way: “To [re]pay their fair share.”
To suggest otherwise or apply her argument only selectively means Warren’s “logic” fails on it’s merits and is therefore, fallacious.
Yes, aside from the specifics that you point out in your analysis of her comments, is the basic fact that if the achievers DON’T build their factories, and earn profits, her socialist utopia won’t get their thirty percent, or fifty percent, or whatever she feels benevolent enough to allow them to keep.
That’s what we’re seeing right now. Yes, the wealthy and corporations are flush with cash, but they’re not spending it, they’re not investing in new factories, because they don’t have confidence in a stable business environment in the future. How long before Obama comes up with another brilliant lot of “free” stuff for everyone (free contraception for all!!!). And if idiots like her keep nattering on about “paying it forward”, or whatever euphemism she wants to use to refer to wealth confiscation, these people/corporations will take their marbles offshore for good.
Excellent analysis. Thank you for sharing. I hope many others, including voters in Massachusetts, get an opportunity to read this and come to understand the real Liz Warren.
First they came for the corporate jet owners and I didnt complain because I didnt own a jet. Then they came for the factory owner and I didnt complain because I didnt own a factory.
Then they came for my 401k and there was no one left to argue that I should get to keep my own money.
Please never again use such an important piece of writing about the holocaust and the persecution of Jewish people in Nazi Germany in such a trivial manner.
You should be better than that.
Please STFU. Take your unearned arrogance and stuff it. Property rights matter.
Actually, it is quite germane because the author was himself a Nazi in good standing until he got purged himself. The crocodile did not eat him last!
Nice try at a reverse Godwin argument. You do realize that Martin Niemöller was himself a Nazi in good standing…until he wasn’t any more. Hoping that the sharks eat you last is not a good strategy for survival against government usurpations.
Should I have used an unimportant reference instead? perhaps rewritten a burma shave ad to make my point??
Help me out here. If we live in a society where its ok to demonize one part of the community as “evil” and thus justify our crimes against that part of our society then what right do we have when those that do the demonizing finally come around to getting to us?
And mark my words, they will in the end, come for us, because they always do. Freedom and liberty is the actual target, we are the enemy, not “the rich”. If those words make you uncomfortable, good. They should, and for exactly the reasons you specified in your badly aimed retort.
If we think we have a right to confiscate one persons property then what right do we have to keep our own property? Who establishes the “greater good” on which these state crimes against the individual can occur? If a persons property is subject to the state and its whims, then is the individual also subject to the whims of the state??
Where do I stand? I am not a subject of this or any other government. I am a citizen of this country. The government we have here ( for the moment) is my servant; it is not my master. There’s a difference, a big, big difference between being a subject of a government and having the franchise of citizenship.
The concept of “class” is as unamerican and as out of date as monarchism. We should embrace the doctrines of class warfare as eagerly as we embrace the rule of kings. What is also true is that the concept of “class” cannot exist within a democracy or a republic, it can only exist within a feudal dictatorship. If its a dictatorship that you wish to live in, all I ask is that you be clear to your intent.
My intent should be clear; the place I want to live has the words “All men are created equal” enshrined into its core political doctrine. Be warned: A government that cannot or will not act to protect and ensure the property rights of all of its citizens cannot protect the human rights of any its citizens and in the end, all of us, rich and poor, will perish not from a lack of someone elses money, but from a lack of Freedom and Liberty.
There is nothing trivial about it. It seems to me Warren and her ilk are deliberately trying to drive away the factory builders ( people who are empowered). Even if that is not their plan, it will be the result. Additionally they have made very devious and malicious efforts toward disarming the rest of us ( gunwalker). The end result will be them lording it over an impoverished, unarmed, helpless population.( credit for that line goes to another commenter on here, but forgive me, I dont remember who).
Stevo, if you dont think what we are seeing is the entrance of a road that ends in places like auschwitz, you are mistaken.
BTW, It is also a mistake to tell people on PJM, especially ones smarter than you are, to shut-up. This aint the huff-n-puff.
And the libertarian circle-jerk continues…
To the author of this article, while each of your points may be factually valid I fear you have missed the point of Warrens speech.
Warren is arguing against a concept, an idea which is taking hold and forms the basis for most of the arguments of the Tea Party. The concept that no one should be taxed, businesses should be left alone to run themselves and all the wealth will trickle down.
Taken in this context it is clear that even though it is true that factory bosses currently pay for a lot of the services they use, that doesn’t invalidate her argument that further tax cuts and tax breaks for the rich are morally wrong.
And you know this about the “Tea Party” from which source(s) . . . .?
Please cite actual documentation, speeches, quotes from “tea party” functionaries and leaders or manifestos.
Thank you.
No, you are wrong. There is no substance to her viewpoint. She assumes that the wealth existed already to build those roads and such. She assumes it came ex nihilo.
Whence came such wealth to build the roads? How did “the rest of us” manage to pay for those roads? With our taxes? How got we the money for the taxes? From our jobs? How came we by such jobs? From the rich guy.
In the beginning, there was nothing, and society was void. Then some enterprising (hungry) fellows decided to create more. It is the enterprising fellow who creates all the wealth.
The Marxists use the trope that the workers create the wealth, and the evil rich exploit them and steal the wealth. We’re gonna steal it back.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Workers do not create wealth. If they knew how to create wealth… they’d be wealthy! The wealthy people create the wealth, because they know how. It is a skill-set. Wealth starts between one’s ears.
It is the liberal mindset that they do not know how the wealth came to be. They never give it any thought. It just magically appears. It has just always existed, and will always be.
This was shown in 2009. Obama’s advisers told him that there would be a recovery. There is always a recovery. So, he could go ahead with his plans for Stimulus (payoffs), ObamaCare, etc…. Then the recovery just… stopped. We got back only 60% of what we lost. We have never recovered. And they cannot understand it. The magic flow of wealth had just… stopped.
Still, they never question their beliefs, even in the face of grotesque failure. Still do they demand the wealth. You have the wealth, so they will get it from you. Give us your wealth. You owe it to society. WE made it all possible.
All your factory belong to us.
Where did the rich guy get his money in the first place?
Presumably from all the others who gave it to him. How did they get to him? On roads that he and they helped build together. Maybe he pays a large portion of the taxes, but they do the labor… It’s all circular. Social fabric.
“Trickle down”? Note the passive sense, like Theodore Dalrymple’s, “The knife went in.” It indicates that the thing occurs as a force of nature, and that noone is accountable for it. It merely happens, as a product of nature.
BS. There is nothing passive about confiscation at the point of a gun.
Tell you what, Redman: I’ll keep mine and you shut up and make your own. I don’t want to trickle anything to you, or that dopey Warren. I thought slavery was outlawed, or is that only for blacks? Slavery is what it’s called when you take the fruits of my labor against my will, and it is as old as sin. It is, indeed, the default setting of lazy, shiftless mankind, especially Harvard faculty and people like you. It is truly slavery. We are now, as they say, merely haggling on the price.
Trickle this, butthead.
That’s not what “trickle down” means. The trickle-down effect is purely capitalistic and has nothing to do with taxes.
Suppose an entrepreneur ends up with a pile of money that his business generated as profit. What’s he going to do with it? Well, he’ll spend some of it — which means buying goods or services from other people. That creates jobs for the folks who make those goods or buy those services.
He may choose to reinvest some of the profits in his business by expanding, or buying new equipment. That means he can hire more people, and if he buys equipment, more jobs for the people who make that equipment.
Perhaps he uses some of the money to pay off debts. That benefits the people who lent him the money in the first place.
If he has money left over, he’ll probably invest it so that it will grow. He may do this directly, by buying stock, or indirectly, by putting the money into a bank (which then lends the money to other entrepreneurs, people who want to buy homes or cars, and other borrowers). In other words, he makes his money available for other people to borrow. That benefits everyone who needs to buy something that they can’t pay cash for.
Or he may donate some of it to charity. That obviously benefits the charity and the people it’s trying to help.
In fact, there’s only one thing he can do with his money that WON’T benefit other people. He could just sit on it — lock it in a vault, or stuff it under a mattress. But no sane businessman does that, because it means forfeiting the interest that the money could be earning for you if you invested it.
That’s what trickle-down means. The very existence of wealthy people in our society benefits all of us, because it’s literally impossible for them to use their money in ways that don’t benefit lots of other people.
That’s a very good explaination of trickle down. It’s a term that has been lied about and demogaged since Reagan.
John F. Kennedy understood the concept when he said, “A rising tide lifts all boats.”
By that, he meant that an improving economy helps everyone. You can’t improve the economy by confiscating wealth, skimming the top for bureaucracy and graft, then returning the remainder to your cronies. Put simply, the government can not be a net producer of jobs because it must first remove money from the economy before it returns a portion of it back. In the end, less jobs are created than they would’ve been had the money been left with its rightful owners.
What you are talking about is supply side economics which has been proven to not work. Demand is what drives the economy not supply. It’s why no companies are hiring right now. Give them a tax break to hire but if there really is no demand then they won’t. It goes against rational thinking of any business person to hire just because of a marginal benefit. They are hording it and only those who have maxed out the productivity of their current workers will hire.
Whether intending to battle actual factory owners or abstract ideas, Warren’s comments still show a stunning lack of depth in her thought and morality.
Each of those public accommodations is available to all. Warren confuses getting more with doing more.
Everyone has access to roads. Police protect each individuals’ right life and their right to property, rights possessed by all in equal dignity (even if the property itself is distributed through the market, the right to property doesn’t vary with income; police don’t get paid to return stolen goods, they get paid to put away thieves).
Student loans and education are assistance with an investment in one’s self; as an individual, the educated worker commands a higher salary (which they are taxed on while also repaying the government), and those individuals are free to take their education wherever they desire, they are not compelled to go to the factory of Ms. Warren’s example.
The fact that someone has been more productive with their equal share of those public goods should not be held against them.
What of the 47% who pay no income tax, or those that draw welfare? Those are the net takers, not only having the same access to roads, student loans, and the protections of the police, but deriving additional benefits from the state, and all without corresponding production.
The police do not protect everybody — they can’t unless they happen to be exactly where the crime is committed. It isn’t their fault physics (time and space) gets in the way. You are your own first line of defense. The Police come to clean up the mess and try to find the perpetrator. That is what the Second Amendment says. The individual citizen is the first line of defense of the nation including civil order. In professor Warren’s world everything is in the state and nothing is outside the state. In such a world civil society and civil order eventually break down.
http://www.christianlouboutinonlinesale.com/christian-louboutin-beige-suede-trailer-platform-sandals-p-200.html
– $200K per couple makes them rich.
I like the clueless, pleading look on Warren’s face in the picture which tops the thread.
There is an expression common to many of these Kumbaya Kids: a combination of bovine earnestness and fatuous, sheeplike smugness.
Echoes of it are visible on the faces of their manipulators, like David Axelrod—but there, the radiant smugness has behind it a glint of secret glee.
Right, roads, bridges, police and fire to keep them safe, SURE I wanna contribute towards THOSE. Solyndra and other “green energy” BS, Stimuli, hacks like Elizabeth Warren, the Departments of Education and Energy, etc, are all WASTES OF MONEY because they’re just payoffs to various and sundry cronies of thieving useless pols. I DON’T want to pay anymore HARD-EARNED money toward that crap. It’s about time we get people in power (NOT Warren, obviously) who can FIGURE OUT THE EFFING DIFFERENCE! It definitely seems to be a habit (more likely an intentional manipulation) that the Obamas and Warrens of the world want to pretend ALL government spending is useful and necessary in order to prevent anyone from examining it TOO closely. It’s obviously NOT true.
Bookworm, why are you prattling on about the founding principles and the Constitution? Didnt you hear the queen-bitch of the progressives laugh and proclaim that asking about the constitutionality of laws was not a serious question? Those principles and the constitution are so….yesterday.
the left are offering up hanging curves over and over again yet the current opposition still handles it like pedro cerrano
hope the repubicans say “F.U. Jobu” before another defeat is snatched from the jaws of victory
Charlie Uncle Nan Tare
This woman is SO FULL of MANURE she could fertilize a 100 acre field!
Now, now boys. I have recently had to leave a country that hates taxes, lets the factories and the owners keep all their hard earned profits, and doesn’t care much about who supports the roads and infrastructure, paying the police or educating their children in public schools.
It’s called Mexico.
You too can have a country just like that one by ridiculing Elizabeth Warren and people who believe that there is a social contract that should be honored.
Listen up bob. 47% of Americans pay no income taxes. No representation without taxation. Get it? Voting someone else’s money out of their wallet and into your own is theft. That’s where we are today. Like it or don’t, it’s what is. And there’s no right way to do the wrong thing. Time to stop. The limited republican government of the Constitution is grown out of all proportion, and with the increase in scope has come corruption. Social contract my RIA!
It is such a pleasure to see sweetsy cutesy exposed for her “real self.” Time for the conservatives to get on the move and drop the corruption along the way.