In last week\u2019s incredible gaffe (\u201cIf you\u2019ve got a business \u2013 you didn\u2019t build that.\u00a0 Somebody else made that happen.\u201d) President Obama expressed an idea about the government and the people that most Americans do not accept.\u00a0 And it wasn\u2019t his idea alone.<\/p>\n
Elizabeth Warren, the ultra-liberal Massachusetts Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, used almost exactly the same words some months ago: \u201cYou 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\u2026.\u201d\u00a0 That fact is, representatives of the American Left have expressed the same sentiments repeatedly over the years.<\/p>\n
Set aside that all of us \u2013 not \u201cthe rest of us\u201d \u2013 pay for everything our state and local governments do.\u00a0 Set aside that if federal dollars are the question, only the upper 60 percent of earners \u2013 and mostly the upper 30 percent \u2013 have paid for anything in recent years.\u00a0 Thanks to changes in the tax law, Federal revenue has become increasingly \u2013 some might say dangerously \u2013 dependent on higher earners.<\/p>\n
\u201cDangerously\u201d because, as California has discovered, top earners tend to have highly volatile \u2013 boom, bust \u2013 incomes, magnifying downswings of government revenue during a recession.\u00a0 \u201cDangerously\u201d also because it isn\u2019t healthy when government depends too much on one slice of the people for its funding, no matter which slice of the population that is.\u00a0 But most of all \u201cdangerously\u201d because the increasing concentration of taxation at the top has opened the door to championing a new (for the United States) relationship of the individual to the state — and this is just what the president has done.<\/p>\n
That new view comes down to this.\u00a0 If so much as a sewer line passes before your house and you hook up to it, we (controllers of the state) own you.\u00a0 Private activity exists only at our (the state\u2019s) sufferance.\u00a0 No personal risk, no creative insight, no dogged exertion, no right of property, nothing overcomes the primacy of the state\u2019s claim on you and all you produce.<\/p>\n
Another thought, less frequently expressed, is part of this view: highly successful private activity is a scam.\u00a0 To Balzac is attributed, \u201cBehind every great fortune lies a great crime.\u201d\u00a0 This attitude about the illegitimacy of private achievement \u2013 private property, too \u2013 comes up again and again in the American and global Left, and it seems implicit in the fury of the president\u2019s rant.<\/p>\n
It is as if he were stuck in old Europe, where the people were subjects, that is, serfs to the state, which had first claim on everything.\u00a0 America has always been very different.\u00a0 It is the creation of free and independent citizens.\u00a0 The state belongs to us.<\/p>\n
Put another way, to most of us, America is \u201cwe\u201d the people.\u00a0 But the idea behind the president\u2019s rant was \u201cyou\u201d the people.<\/p>\n
The president should consider that he is pointing the accusatory finger in exactly the wrong direction.\u00a0 For months he has been saying that his administration has \u201ccreated\u201d jobs, meaning private as well as public sector jobs.\u00a0 Many economists now believe that every new public sector job comes at the expense of even more private sector jobs.\u00a0 Through its taxing and borrowing, government hogs resources that in private hands would create even more employment.<\/p>\n
But isn\u2019t the point of private sector job creation that it is the product of private effort \u2013 from small business and entrepreneurs to giant corporations and everyone in between?\u00a0 Government can get in the way or out of it.\u00a0 Our problem has been that in the last four years government has too often and in too many ways got in the way.<\/p>\n
So when the president starts boasting of creating new jobs \u2013 a claim that underpinned last week\u2019s rant as well \u2013 shouldn\u2019t the rest of us respond: \u201cYou didn\u2019t do that.\u00a0 Some one else made that happen.\u201d?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In last week\u2019s incredible gaffe (\u201cIf you\u2019ve got a business \u2013 you didn\u2019t build that.\u00a0 Somebody else made that happen.\u201d) President Obama expressed an idea about the government and the people that most Americans do not accept.\u00a0 And it wasn\u2019t his idea alone. Elizabeth Warren, the ultra-liberal Massachusetts Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, used […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[12],"class_list":["post-1283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political-commentary-general","tag-hugh-hewitt"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1283"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1283\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1285,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1283\/revisions\/1285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}