At Bloomberg, Josh Barro has an excellent essay about why “you didn’t build that” is a problem. I’ll commend to you all the whole essay, but in the middle of it, he quotes from a scene in the second season of The West Wing:
The president’s speech calls to mind a second-season West Wing episode, in which speechwriter Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) explains to the staff of some liberal house members why he won’t insert a line in President Bartlet’s upcoming speech. They want the president to attack Republican tax cut proposals as financing “private jets and swimming pools” for the wealthy. As Seaborn argues:
Henry, last fall, every time your boss got on the stump and said, “It’s time for the rich to pay their fair share,” I hid under a couch and changed my name. I left Gage Whitney making $400,000 a year, which means I paid twenty-seven times the national average in income tax. I paid my fair share, and the fair share of twenty-six other people. And I’m happy to ’cause that’s the only way it’s gonna work, and it’s in my best interest that everybody be able to go to schools and drive on roads, but I don’t get twenty-seven votes on Election Day. The fire department doesn’t come to my house twenty-seven times faster and the water doesn’t come out of my faucet twenty-seven times hotter. The top one percent of wage earners in this country pay for twenty-two percent of this country. Let’s not call them names while they’re doing it, is all I’m saying.
When Barack Obama has made an argument for progressive taxation that even Aaron Sorkinfinds distasteful, he has erred. That’s not a problem that has anything to do with the president being black.
“I agree with David Frum that the most toxic part of the speech is Barack Obama talking about the sources of success:
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.
Really? The president is always struck by people who take credit for their own successes? Obviously, every successful outcome in life — and every failed one — arises from a combination of internal and external factors. But the president’s tone when he said this, amused by the very idea of people taking credit for their achievements, was off-putting.
Frum mostly talks about why this statement irks rich people, but I believe it resonates badly with people at all income levels. Lots of people — most, I hope — are proud of something they’ve achieved in their lives and feel like that achievement owes much to their own hard work and talents. You don’t have to make over $250,000 a year to be annoyed when the president mocks people for taking credit for their achievements.
Usually offering anecdotal evidence is not terribly persuasive, so I tend to avoid it.
However, helping SMB’s is my day job and my passion. Allow me to submit an observation. NOTHING that this administration has done or said has prompted the visceral reaction I am seeing and hearing on a daily basis as much as this has with these folks.
I deal with them every day and they generally don’t offer up their politics unprompted. THIS…has them chafing and really put off.
From my perspective as “cfbleachers” here at Roger’s place…I can think of fifty things that I find more loathsome, dangerous, despicable. This was offensive, but not any more telling to me than a thousand other things that I already knew that would lead me to the same conclusion.
However, the SMB owners and executives have reacted VERY strongly and VERY negatively.
The arrogance, the unmitigated gall that this clumsy amateur who has never build so much as a lemonade stand as a stand alone business, would dare to insult and denigrate the “smarts and hard work” it takes to be one of the country’s “employers to the masses”.
Some people may be surprised to learn that even today, the U.S. economy is by no means dominated by giant corporations. Fully 99 percent of all independent enterprises in the country employ fewer than 500 people.
These small enterprises account for 52 percent of all U.S. workers, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA). Some 19.6 million Americans work for companies employing fewer than 20 workers, 18.4 million work for firms employing between 20 and 99 workers, and 14.6 million work for firms with 100 to 499 workers. By contrast, 47.7 million Americans work for firms with 500 or more employees.
If you build a company that employs less than 100 workers, you may have “income” of $250,000 but you are NOT RICH.
And for a guy who did nothing in his life except find ways to tear down business, protest them, tie them up with bureaucratic red tape and threatened litigation…he has some chutzpah telling these “bitter clingers” that they aren’t smart and they aren’t hard working enough for his tastes.
The golfer/vacationer who has slopped at the public trough throughout his life hit a nerve and it has prompted a recoil that still is resonating.
No matter how much he tries to water it down and scrub it from its true intent, it’s the “you’re not that smart, you’re not that hard working” that teed up the “you didn’t build that”. After it was teed up, the duffer in chief hit it out of bounds…and now is trying to kick it back onto the fairway with a foot wedge. He just needs to get his cleats out of his mouth to do that.
The egregious Frum? The Egregious Frum who wrote conservatives, opposed to the 2nd Iraq war, out of the Republican party? There is nothing I want to hear from him (bloody damn neocon).
Didn’t Obama make his money from a book he contributed to? Did he plant and harvest the trees and make paper of them? Did he create the ink? Did he cast the moveable type himself, arrange it, and build and operate the printing press? Did the Feds fund his little jaunt to Asia where he worked on his book? Did he design and build the airplanes that transported him there?
And while we are at it, who surrounds himself with flunkies who proclaim that he is the smartest man alive? Every commenter at PJM is smart, reads avidly, and spends time an effort to make intelligent posts. I haven’t noticed Obama sharing his wealth with us or, for that matter, with his illegal immigrant relatives.
Obama doesn’t think about his book as a product of his own blood, sweat and tears that would give him a feeling of ownership because Ayers actually wrote it, silly.
I agree with CFB. Pres. Obama struck a nerve with this one…
It’s simpler and more down-to-earth than that. Maybe the political point was about the “1%”, but Obama didn’t diss the “1%”, he dissed the gardener and the plumber and the dry cleaner who all built their businesses while making well less than the top percentile in income. Nobody cares about the “1%”. This was a smack in the face to everybody who decided to forego working for somebody else and instead start a gas station or drive a wildcat truck or build web pages for a living. This was a big monumental middle finger at the doers who earn reasonable but not ostentatious livings doing all the little but necessary things that the economy needs.
And it was a big monumental middle finger from somebody who’s had everything handed to him all his life, and has never worked for anything.
That’s what’s so outrageous about this. Nobody cares about the “1%”.
We did ask our gardener. Here in SoCal, almost all of them are immigrants from somewhere south of the border, and Lupe has an accent about as thick as it can get. Turns out his parents were immigrants, lived in the Valley, and Lupe was born at the hospital at the other end of my street (ca. 200 yds. from my front door). They didn’t like the U.S. (for what reason I don’t know) and went back when he was 3. He’s a citizen, though, because he works here. Mows lawns, cleans bathrooms, works like a horse, and is determined to send his son to college. Little guy works the lawnmower with his dad sometimes.
I haven’t asked him, but I wonder how my (probably illegal immigrant, but I haven’t asked that either) gardener, who built his business from a pick up and a lawn mower to a small fleet of well equipped trucks employing several crews of workers over the last ten years, feels about President Obama’s comments?
That Chait guy is a lazy thinker. It is easy to use stereotypes like “racist Republican” instead of thinking carefully about BHO’s off-script boner.
An example of oxymoron, or just moron: a lazy thinker.
Another example of oxymoron: Chait, a thinker.
That was then; this is now. If Bama wants it, I betcha Sorkin’s OK with it.
“West Wing” is full of such discreet asides. I’ve often wondered if Sorkin is secretly a Mamet Conservative.
The problem is that any really good fiction writer has to believe in some part of their minds everything every one of their characters believes. When Sorkin gets out of his own way, he’s a very good fiction writer. Then he goes to a party, and someone snarks at him.
“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.”
Sounds to me like someone is projecting.
H ave to admit I’ve really begun to believe the model where Obama really thinks that because he knows he didn’t have to work so hard, or be so terribly smart, to get where he is, and it weighs on him.
Either that, or more likely, that since getting into the white house was so easy for him, lesser outcomes must be even easier. It’s hard work playing golf.
That’s not a problem that has anything to do with the president being black.
That it’s necessary to explain that is a huge problem in and of itself. Instead of doing so, how about we stop letting Leftist bad faith define the debate?
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.
The roads, sewers, and other infrastructure exist with or without the entrepreneur.
The endless red tape, taxes, licensing fees, red tape, regulations, red tape,… that face the entrepreneur exist and are constantly growing.
Bam-Bam, your beloved government is a major impediment to starting a business. They didn’t get the business started because of you and your bureaucracy, they got them going in spite of you.
And please remember that in MANY cases, the business DID build the road, or paid for the sewer plant, or laid the water lines and paid an “impact fee” to the water district to contribute to the cost of building the water treatment facility.
I am reminded of Milton Friedman’s story of the pencil.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ERbC7JyCfU
I read more, and I think less, into that “you didn’t build that” statement than everyone else does. I’ve heard (and I find it believable, since if you go back to the audio the speech was very incoherent, with lots of pauses and stumbles) that they were trying to wean him from his teleprompter. The guy has gotten attached to it to the point that even the MSM on occasion has mocked him for never going anywhere without it. My favorite was when he was making the speech at the elementary school, to the students, and he had to have the teleprompter, podium with the presidential seal on it, etc…to speak to a group of 3rd Graders.
Anyway, he was off the teleprompter, so he’s speaking more off the cuff, and he was trying to explain why higher taxes are reasonable. I’m sure in his mind he thinks that someone who makes $250,000 a year while running a small business is “rich”, but everyone needs to be reminded, this is a man with *no* practical business experience whatsoever. He’s not evil, he’s just monumentally stupid.
Sorry. Anyone who provides guns to criminals who then kill 300+ innocent people is evil. Either that or the word has no meaning.
I take your point, sort of. You have to comprehend my way of thinking, however. Assuming he knew about it (and the way things look, it wouldn’t surprise me if Holder or someone else senior in Washington concocted F&F, and Obama’s just trying to cover their ass to save his own), but assuming he knew about it, this is the sort of really smart guy who can just not get all the permutations of something. I can see someone on his level authorizing the sale of guns to Mexican drug cartels, and rationalizing the people that get murdered by the guns (they would have been killed anyway, it’s for a good cause, etc.) without ever really thinking the whole thing through.
In his own mind, he’s too smart to make this big of a mistake…so he didn’t.
As for him being evil…I always refer to Heinlein: “Never ascribe to malice that which can be plausibly explained by stupidity.” It’s just that the Democrats have a *lot* that needs explaining, in this regard.
When i think of Fastand Furious i am reminded of one of Hitchcock’s lesser known films “The Rope”. A couple of intellectuals concoct a scheme to committ the perfect murder for the sole purpose of validating their intellectual superiority. Having such an inflated view of one’s own superiority can erase one’s morality.
(misinfo alert: Obama didn’t actually use the teleprompter to talk to the kids. The visit with the students was closed to the press, and he had the teleprompter set up to say a few words to the press afterward. That’s also pretty indicative of his dependence on the teleprompter, but not exactly the same.)
Not a big deal but it never hurts to be accurate.
Everyone teed off on the President when he said that you did not build it on your own — but he was right. You built it in the United States because here we have the rule of law. Here you have a system of laws and property rights that let you know what was yours, let you collect debts, let you enforce contracts, let you know what the rules were for playing in the market. You had good roads and transportation–built using eminent domain. You had a power distribution system (built using eminent domain) that insured you would have power. You had clean water brought to you by municipal water distribution and kept clean by the EPA.
What you are losing is a viable market because outsourcing business want to “free ride” on the backs of others. In the 1950s and 1960s when Unions were strong, you had more equal income distribution and the market thrived because well paid union workers could afford to buy new cars, vacation cottages, send their kids to college.
That is gone today because all too smart managers thought they could make more for themselves if they shipped labor jobs offshore (and paid slave wages) and shipped the goods back to the US.
What everyone forgets is that the US market works only when workers are paid a fair wage.
President Obama was right, you built your business because your neighbors followed the rule of law and paid their workers (and your customers) a fair wage. Those days are gone.
Harry, you inflate the importance of that infrastructure way too much, probably due to ignorance of the thousands of decisions made, risks taken, choices made, that lead to business success. Those items certainly reduce the cost of business, which savings are passed along to the consumers who also paid for that infrastructure and also benefit from them, but let me ask you this: who made the cars and trucks that go over those roads? Who made the stuff that those trucks carry? Who provides the jobs that those people in those cars work at that provides the wages that enables those people to buy that stuff? It’s the overlooking of the FAR LARGER contribution that CORRECT personal decisions, in which the government plays a NEGATIVE (not a positive) part, that is grating. Again, only someone who HASN’T built a business HAS NO CLUE will tend to inflate the importance of government.
This statement of Obama was made in a larger context, and expresses his Marxist tendencies: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” ASKS NO QUESTIONS NOR GIVES CREDIT to the “from Eachers”, and ASKS NO QUESTIONS about how the “to eachers” have NO ability that excuses them from having to cough up the goods being transferred.
It is said that “Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan”: If that “brilliant teacher” that Obama spoke of is so much of the “cause” of Steve Jobs’ success, then where are the OTHER 29 Apple sized corporations in the 30 pupil class that that “brilliant teacher” also taught? Ask THAT question, and the answer quickly comes back “they made poor choices. they were lazy, they were not smart, they didn’t work hard.” The excuses for failure will NEVER include the teacher themself. What about the other teachers in that same school who DIDN’T produce a Steve Jobs per classroom per year? Ditto for the roads: the roads that supposedly “caused” the profit of the business people ALSO exist for the welfare recipients. Why didn’t these “miracle causing” infrastructures make THEM into small business owners?
In the “REAL” world, when someone comes along and claims that “you owe them money”, the PROPER response YOU would give (but apparently want to deny others to give) is “Send me the itemized bill”. I am sure that the disposition of tax money and borrowed money is available, and I believe, if you carefully examine it, that a large share of it (and any EXTRA FEDERAL TAX you are being asked to pay) does not, in fact, go to these infrastructure projects, but to transfer payments: “to those according to their NEED”.
Oh, and you’ll NEVER get an income tax that will REALLY soak the rich, because a lot of congresscritters are themselves rich, and write the loopholes in that they will use, but cannot forbid others to use. All they CAN do is scream “YOU DIDN’T BUILD THAT!”
No PA I don’t. For most business start ups, the key to success is a good close to home market. That means we can turn on the lights, the water works, the plumbing works, and we can put our goods on a truck to ship it to the buyer. For other businesses, restaurants, hair salons, dry cleaners, furniture stores, plumbers, machine shops, injection molders, small scale steel fabricators, etc., the key to success is a good market. For makers of TV sets, radios, microwaves (oops, sorry we don’t make those in the US anymore …)
You missed my point about a good market, when in the old days we paid fair wages to workers, we had a great market, When private equity started to advise (along with consultants) to ship jobs overseas, we wrecked the market. You cannot sell into a market unless you support its wages.
Yes, you DO, Harry, because you continue to REFUSE to even ACKNOWLEDGE ANY role that personal choices, hard work, and risk taking make in business success, while Richard40 and others acknowledge in their comments that government has *some* role. I suspect it is because you realize that it plays a bigger role than you want to admit, since from your comments, you’re more than quick to WHINE about the choices business owners and executives make to take their businesses elsewhere, but REFUSE to admit the symmetric role that their choices made in bringing their businesses into existence here. Again, SEND THE BILL, and at the same time, take the rose colored glasses off that excuses you from seeing the red ink of the COSTS of government.
The fallacy you are arguing is that because SOME of what Government does is beneficial, that EVERYTHING the Government does is worth financing to an equal level. You insist that we cuddle the bathwater with the baby, and wrongfully accuse us of tossing out the baby when we try to get rid of the bathwater. The two “benefits” the Wright Brothers got from government came from branches CONSTITUTIONALLY mandated to provide their services, and the Wright brothers gave value for value, quite unlike the “to eachers” who would get the bulk of the additional revenue raised by the taxes Obama and you lust for, and give nothing in return except VOTES to keep your pols in power.
Harry is both right and wrong.
He is right in that governments can and do create conditions for success, and this is historically demonstrated. The “Pax Romana” plus good roads brought enormous prosperity to Europe. Just about every great “Golden Age” from 17th Century to Amsterdam to modern day China can be at least in part attributed to government actions which created conditions for prosperity to exist.
BUT… he misses 2 crucial things. First, the one thing that all those historical “Golden Age” governments ALSO did was allow those who had the combination of drive and smarts to undertake daring entrepreneurial endeavors to become very rich. Incentive is real. North Korea can build all the great highways it wants, it will not prosper because there is no incentive to become rich, when private money is just seen as plunder to be seized.
Second, he engages, like many ideologues, in “bundling”. Packaging utter crap along with a good idea, and assuming that they absolutely must go together. Sort of like religious leaders, who proclaim that since they oppose murder and demand you wear a funny hat and bow when the High Shaman passes by, you should support them, because if you don’t you obviously are in favor of murder. Roads are good. Rome proved that 2 millenia ago. But the Romans did that without the Davis Bacon Act, without 10 year study and permit processes, without a thousand other things that we bundle with our road building that does nothing but bog the system down and cost more money.
If the government agencies responsible for road construction had the same retirement benefits, and the same number of days off, as their civilian counterparts, and got by with the same management-to-labor ratio as their civilian counterparts, and maybe somehow designed a road in six months instead of six years, those roads would still be built, and maybe we wouldn’t have to be banging so many drums to shrink the government.
And maybe, just maybe, if government saw the roads as “vital infrastructure” and not a large patronage program, they would be built and maintained correctly. Really. Drive up NYC’s west side highway, cross the GW bridge, drive out into New Jersey on Route 4. You’ll pass a lot of electronic signage. Somehow, all the ones that DON’T WORK belong to the government. This is because if an executive at Fairway Supermarket looks up and sees his electronic sign not working, SOMEONE is in trouble. If manager at the George Washington bridge sees his signs not working… again… yawn. Submit the paperwork… go back to sleep.
Harry writes:
Everyone teed off on the President when he said that you did not build it on your own — but he was right.
At best, only half right. It’s true that government can, and does, help, but it’s the businessman who has to do the “heavy lifting” of actually getting the business up and running, and keeping it running.
You built it in the United States because here we have the rule of law. Here you have a system of laws and property rights that let you know what was yours, let you collect debts, let you enforce contracts, let you know what the rules were for playing in the market.
Fair enough.
You had good roads and transportation–built using eminent domain. You had a power distribution system (built using eminent domain) that insured you would have power.
Mostly untrue.
It’s true enough that present-day public roads were and are built with public funds on rights-of-way obtained through eminent domain. In days long gone now, much of our transportation network was built using private funds, on rights-of-way obtained through purchase, not through eminent domain. Canals, turnpikes, and — most important of all — railroads were the transportation methods that allowed our grandparents to have a standard of living a century ago that more closely resembles our standard of living than it did their grandparents’ standard of living. The Interstate Highway System is certainly nice to have, along with the old US highways, but there’s no good reason why they had to be built with public funds, aside from the fact (as a commenter further down the comments section notes) that such a privately-funded highway system is unlawful in most states. Go figure. On second thought, no head-scratching is needed. As I once saw on a bumper-sticker: “Don’t steal– the government hates competition”. When it comes to transportation networks, the government may not be stealing, but it certainly likes control, and banning competition is one way to get control.
As for our (overly-centralized and therefore failure-prone) electric power system being built largely through the use of eminent domain, I can believe that of the TVA and other gigantic, dysfunctional government-built projects. As for the privately-owned power companies, I suspect they were built largely with private money, much as the railroads were.
You had clean water brought to you by municipal water distribution and kept clean by the EPA.
Yes and no. Water and sewer are legitimate public functions, where applicable. No one disputes that much. As for the EPA being some knight in shining armor making possible clean water….. meh. Having rivers catch fire (as in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1969….?) isn’t a good thing. But is government truly essential? Or is it better to employ private ownership of resources as much as possible to minimize the problem of “tragedy of the commons”? Private owners of a resource take care of it– it is, after all, the source of the owners’ prosperity. Privatizing all resources is impossible, I think, but making them all public isn’t good either– look at the environmental nightmares faced by many of the countries of the former Communist Bloc, thanks to the wastefulness, carelessness, and even malice of the old regimes.
What you are losing is a viable market because outsourcing business want to “free ride” on the backs of others. In the 1950s and 1960s when Unions were strong, you had more equal income distribution and the market thrived because well paid union workers could afford to buy new cars, vacation cottages, send their kids to college.
The prosperity of the ’50s and ’60s wasn’t an illusion so much as it was unsustainable. It was fueled not so much by American excellence in absolute terms as it was by excellence in relative terms– all of our pre-war competitors in the world’s markets had been bled white (Britain, France, etc.) or had been bombed flat (Germany and Japan, chiefly). We were the only game in town back then, in a position to enjoy monopoly profits, and boy, did our parents enjoy them. Once our competitors got back on their feet, they rubbed our noses in our complacency, becoming excellent in manufacturing and other field, both in absolute terms, and in relative terms (i.e., better than us).
Our parents and grandparents had it easy fifty or sixty years ago. We now have to work for a living. What a shock.
That is gone today because all too smart managers thought they could make more for themselves if they shipped labor jobs offshore (and paid slave wages) and shipped the goods back to the US.
And part of having to work for a living (Oh! the humanity!) means having to do things that make economic sense. Sending certain stages of a manufacturing process overseas because it’s cheaper to have foreigners make the bits and pieces than it is for Americans to make them? Check. Get rid of over-paid, under-worked union labor? Check. (I’ve seen both sides of the management-labor street, at least in the setting of railroads, circa 1990. Unions suck. Management isn’t much better.)
As for foreign workers being paid “slave wages” (an oxymoron, by the way– slaves don’t get wages), has it ever occurred to anyone that the reason people will work for those “slave wages” is that they represent a better deal than what those people can get elsewhere in their part of the world? That the few bucks day they’re getting is a huge pay-boost for them? That it just might be a far better situation for them than laboring from dawn to dusk in some rice-paddy or garbage-pit, and getting a buck for their back-breaking labor? That the few bucks a day they’re getting might just mean that someday they can afford to buy something made by an American worker? Probably not. Bemoaning the fate of the American worker requires little thought. Thinking about how to improve the lot of all workers (“A rising tide lifts all boats,” as JFK remarked, IIRC) is just too darn hard.
What everyone forgets is that the US market works only when workers are paid a fair wage.
Define “fair”, please. As defined by you? Me? Some faceless (and clueless) bureaucrat in Washington? Or by some union goon whose hero is Jimmy Hoffa?
Wages are set by the market, and the laws of economics work the same for everyone, American or foreign. If workers in any given field are complaining that their wages are “unfair” (which is usually a code-word meaning “too low”), maybe there are too many workers in that field, and some of them (the younger ones, at least) should find another line of work, yes?
As for what other line of work those surplus workers should go into, it’s not my problem, or yours, dear reader. Still less is it my job (or yours) to find them one. That’s what classified ads, Craigslist, shoe-leather, and thinking-caps are for.
President Obama was right, you built your business because your neighbors followed the rule of law and paid their workers (and your customers) a fair wage. Those days are gone.
Those days are gone mostly because government at every turn, it seems, has gone out of its way to subvert the rule of law, especially in the last few years. Does the “rescue” of GM ring a bell? If GM’s bankruptcy had been allowed to run its course, per the rule of law, GM would have likely been dissolved, its assets sold off, its bondholders paid off, its stockholders given whatever was left over, and many of its plants given new life churning out VWs, Toyotas, and Hondas. (Who knows, maybe Fords, too.) Instead, the federal government, staffed by Obama’s hacks, subverted the process, gave GM to the unions, stiffed the bondholders, screwed the stockholders, and in the end created a zombie that has consumed tens of billions of taxpayer dollars so far. Uncle Sam can’t sell his remaining 26% stake in Government Motors because if he did, we taxpayers would lose tens of billions more– GM is in such bad shape and its stock price so low that the federal government would get pennies on the dollar for the stock.
This is a government success story? I shudder to think what a “failure story” would be like.
My two cents’ worth.
Hale Adams
Pikesville, People’s Democratic Republic of Maryland
Harry, if what Obama said were true, then what Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and Sam Walton (and so on) built was entirely a product of luck and the government. While it might be convenient for some to imagine that Steve jobs wasn’t smart and didn’t work hard to make Apple the biggest US company, the evidence suggests otherwise.
Harry, I don’t recall people sitting around waiting for the Government to build a road or train track to California before they would make the trip. I’d say the roads were built so the government could have a reliable route available with which to collect taxes. But the most likely reason for roads and bridges being built was because of the horseless carriage that was created by inventors in the PRIVATE SECTOR and then mass produced by the PRIVATE SECTOR, all without the help or need of the government.
And I’m sure the roads and bridges would’ve still been built whether the government got involved or not. The non governmental employee Wright Brothers were the first to achieve powered flight, not the government. The Hoover Damn was a government project that relied on the expertise of private sector contractors to actually figure out how to do it and get it done.
Obama has breastfed off the taxpayers his entire life so it’s no surprise he don’t see how anyone can do something with the governments help.
Elizabeth “The forked tongue Squaw” Warren achieved her success by claiming to be a minority “women of color”, of being 1/32 Cherokee Indian. And what better way to honor her ethnicity than a POW WOW CHOW cook book of favorite recipes no one in her family ever prepared or served during the family gatherings. But it does explain why she too believes that you can’t succeed or “you can’t build that” without the governments help, like “taking advantage of a program intended to help real Native American Indians by claiming to be one yourself.
And finally, I had a friend in Las Vegas who was an Indian, and his first question to any girls we’d meet was “Do you have any Indian In You?” The Girl answers “No”, to which he’d reply, “You want some”. It was amazing how often that worked for him.
That’s the only way Lizzie Warren would ever be 1/32 Indian, but I’m sure my friend never met her.
What is most remarkable about your comment is that government support is so regular and so seamless that most people fail even to notice it. Take the Wright brothers (your example), their first “contract” for commercial development of their airplane was with the US Army. One of the first major purchasers of commercial air service (which really gave birth to the industry) was the US Postal Service which wanted to speed mail delivery with air mail. Government, not the “private sector” took the financial risk on development in that field.
Transportation generally depends on the vast “socialist” enterprise we call roads or those Federal land grants (or state law easement rights) that supported rail road development. The explosive growth of the auto industry after world war two was driven by Federal highway money, the development of the interstate highway system, and favorable zoning laws that encouraged what today we know as suburban sprawl over more sensible urban development. Federal “urban renewal” (that usually tore down old center cities) contributed to drive people and business to suburbs where they needed automobiles. Favorable federal regulation (driven by what we now know was mistaken analysis in Post WWII strategic bombing surveys) favored development of the trucking industry (and decentralization of factories) over railroads in the 1950s. Likewise the Federal governments abject failure to fund mass transit systems during the 1950s and 1960 forced people to purchase cars for transportation. Structural choices affect economic opportunity.
Although individuals certainly do amazing things (the product of their ingenuity and hard work), the opportunities are created in the first instance by a strong healthy market supported by good government. The old saying (and I do not recall who said it first) was that in chess, it is not the queen that kills the king, but the rules applies to the economy.
What everyone seems to ignore lately is that we have a large hole in the present rules. Instead of requiring large companies to engage in what I would call “market building behavior” we allow large companies to cheat the American market by shipping goods made overseas into the American market. Those companies want all the benefits of a strong American market, but those companies do not want to pay fair wages to American workers. Ultimately that behavior–which is a classic example of market failure–will be cured only by a strong regulator who changes the rules and stops large companies from “cheating.” What is good for individuals and individual companies often is destructive of the larger market. Obama’s point was that individual success depends on the work of others who contribute by making opportunities and by engaging in market building activity.
Harry, the problem is that where you’re right, it’s by accident. Yes, as we see with the example of Israel vs the Palestinian kleptocracy, a strong market does require good government. But, as we also see in the example of Israel vs the Palestinian kleptocracy, strong government isn’t the same as good government. Israel has been moving toward more open, less taxed, freer commerce, and has had a massive boom. Obama’s “you didn’t build that” and all the rather more damning things he said around it push the other direction.
About 1971 a college bud who’d graduated a year before me and gone off to NYU film school invited me to join him to watch a “shoot” at a Manhattan studio. It was for a simple shot for Children’s TV Workshop: a naked light bulb hanging from a plain socket and wire against a pure black field, was supposed to explode and expire.
That’s all.
For a ten-second shot.
What I observed: about 40 people standing around the set, presumably on salary, for AT LEAST TWO FULL HOURS.
Did I mention this was to record a ten-second shot?
Director, assistant director, cinematographer, focus-puller, lighting director, script assistant, continuity assistant, assorted lighting assistants and gaffers, craft services (that’s the sandwiches, bagels, OJ, sodas, coffee, napkins, etc.) In addition, there were various essential personnel required by various union rules and city ordinances, such as (IIRC) an I.A.T.S.E. member to aim and fire the Daisy BB gun with which to shoot out the light bulb, a member of the electrician’s union to install the cord, socket, and operate the switch, and TWO union Firefighters standing by with extinguishers lest a stray spark initiate a conflagration.
My friend explained these things to me, and my recollection of some details may be in error, but only insofar as I’ve linked the various personnel to specific unions.
I’ve since worked extensively in animation, only briefly in NYC for a few weeks as an apprentice at a studio that was signatory to union contracts. I quickly learned that there were plenty of production companies that simply paid a fee to the unions (which fees presumably added to the funds benefiting the rank and file… yeah) in return for a union seal in the credits. Otherwise, I’ve worked in “right-to-work” states, and in the games industry in Northern California, where animators, designers, producers, and such, normally work under “non-exempt/at-will” contracts.
Semantics,Shemantics;I dont care how you slice it,dice it or serve it on a plate as long as the meme gets his pathetic self out of the white house in November.
This pretty much sums up my problem with Obama’s economic and political philosophy.
Contrary to the substance of Obama’s words, successful businesses aren’t built on the backs of anyone. Successful businesses don’t create victims; they create happy and prosperous owners, employees, and customers.
Every business is started by individuals and built by those people and the employees who join with them. The taxes, that together they collect and pay, build the roads, bridges, and schools – the infrastructure – that allows other businesses and their employees to start up and prosper. That’s how America was built.
Every time we increase taxes on success, add expensive programs like Obama Care that burden businesses’ ability to hire employees, block production of cheap energy, write so many rules that community banks cannot figure out how to lend, and kill the value of our currency by irresponsible government spending and borrowing – these things destroy the ability of businesses to start and prosper. In so doing, we ruin the very economic system which generates the wealth and infrastructure that will allow our children to pursue their own happiness. Our children’s right to that pursuit of happiness is the God given right which so many Americans before us worked so hard to create and preserve.
In his unguarded statements, not only does Obama show his disdain for business owners, employees, and customers; but also with eloquence and cadence, he charms people into believing that they are victims, that they are less successful than others, not because they are less smart or work less hard, but because the system is rigged against them. Indeed his whole political program is to increase those who see themselves as victims and require a government dole to play on a level field.
My problem with those wallowing in victimhood is that they never build anything for themselves or for their children. Generally they are a burden on everyone else. We do no one a favor by telling them they are victims and lack worth without a handout. And the worst thing is for a President to be telling them they are incapable of pursuing their own happiness without his government’s guiding hand.
i thought the top one percent paid closer to 40% of the tab?
This is from at least a decade ago. The top 1% weren’t “paying their fair share” back then, either, and the increase was supposed to remedy that.
As an aside, I think the rich will finally be paying their fair share…never. It’s a good excuse for the next tax increase.
I’ve asked “what is their fair share, then?” many times.
The only answer I’ve gotten is “more.”
I have to pay to get cold water, but Sorkin’s character gets hot from the government tap, too? I’d love to be this guy’s plumber’s billing clerk. Rube!
If you want to get a quick lesson in I-Pencillism, try building a road, bridge, power or water system on your own, at your own expense. IT IS AGAINST THE LAW!
I don’t want to hear any more crap from these weezers about how much they provide for me, when they have outlawed my means of providing it for myself. And the street I live on — my grandfather built that. No government involved. Come and take it, bitches.
And thus Bastiat’s words ring true again: we have to account for both the seen and the unseen in order to see the true nature of things!
The Seen part is the fact that government sanctioned the building of these roads, water systems, etc.
The unseen part is that no one else is allowed to even if they have the monetary resources to do so!
Bravo Comatus for showing the lie for what it is!
I think Obama just feels like everyone who is successful must have done it hi way–by never doing anything worthwhile and just leeching onto other people until he made it to the next level, at which point he would leech onto someone else. From Tony Rezko and Alison Davis and Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright to Rich Daley and Valerie Jarret and Emil Jones, all the way to the White House–he never accomplished a damn thing and you would be hard-pressewd to say he ever worked a hard day in his adult life. He just figures it’s that way for everyone.
This whole discussion reminds me of a line from Pride and Prejudice:
“I too could have been a great proficient(pianist), had I taken the time to study.” ~Lady Catherine de Berg
That’s just as likely as Barack Obama, the successful businessman. He’s telling himself that he’s as smart as Steve Jobs, as hardworking as Henry Ford, and had he applied himself, he’d be a success in business. Proof positive he understands next to nothing about it. This is pure Obama insecurity. As with everything he says, one must start at the center of the Obama universe to understand it.
That’s why he doesn’t understand the storm that swirled out of control after his speech. It was after all, about him, isn’t everything?
People who espouse this theory have no knowledge about business operations – and aside from the insult – that’s what is really killing Obama about “you didn’t build that”.
It’s a billboard writ large that says “Obama does NOT understand business!” Which at a time of economic peril is a big “DO NOT VOTE FOR HIM” sign.
The real truth is there is an optimal level of gov that is indeed helpful for busines to thrive, so you have vital things like rule of law, courts, police, defence, reasonable regulation, schools, and vital public infrastructure. But even if businesses benefited from these things, how do they benefit from the huge proportion of the budget now devoted to transfer payments. He also ignores the even more vital contributions to success that comes from the larger private economy, and things like venture capital, friends and family, and voluntary organizations, which actually contribute far more effectively than gov. The real rank should be 1 individual effort, 2 voluntary private community, and 3 gov. But obama gives the impression the ranking is reversed, as 1 gov, 2 private community, 3 individual effort. That is his fundamental error, and his phrase “you didn’t build that” distills it down nicely.
Another problem is we have now grossly exceeded that optimum level of gov. So what is the optimum level for fed spending? For most of our history it was 5-10% of GDP, and our nation became the top world power. Under Clinton it was a higher, but still reasonable 18%, and we had good growth and low deficits. Now, under Obama, it has exploded to a completely bloated and unreasonable 25%, the highest since WW2, and we have huge deficits. If physicians behaved like leftists, they would conclude that since 1 multivitamin a day is good for you, 500 must be even better, when in reality that huge dose is fatal. We are now well past the optimum dose for gov, and nearing the fatal dose.
Of course another Obama distortion there is that only the rich should be mainly liable for these things, and that their success depends far more on gov than their own work and brains (which Obama explicitely downgraded earlier in the speech). Dont we all use the roads, and get protection from police, courts, etc. And dont the rich already pay a far higher share of these costs than any benefits they draw. Obama and Warrens speeches are basically another way of saying “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”.
But of course it is pretty hard to explain all this in a 30 second news soundbite, but constantly quoting “you didn’t build that” conveys that basic truthful essence of Obamas erroroneous views pretty darn well.