Separated At Birth?
One is allegedly 1/32 Cherokee, the other allegedly 1/32 coherent, yet they both have something in common. Namely, they both believe in the absolute and inviolable right of one group of people to plunder as much of the property of another group as they can get away with. Here are some samples of their mental gymnastics, along with a few observations:
From Elizabeth Warren:
There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there - good for you! …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 the police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. [The top 5 percent of wage earners, …those who can afford to build factories…, pay 59 percent of federal taxes in this country. The top 10 percent pay 70 percent of the bill. Care to guess again on who paid for those roads, schools, police and fire fighters?] You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. …"[Evidently you've missed the headlines about marauding bands of EPA and DOA swat teams wrecking havoc at private businesses.]
Taking a cue from Ms. Warren's smoke signals, Obama sermonized:
You didn't get their on your own. [Neither did you, Mr. Frequent Flier. And we who pay for Air Force One are growing tired of funding your flights of derision against the productive sector.] I'm always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart," [Says the man who thinks he and a group of like-minded puppet masters inside the beltway have the intelligence to manage the healthcare of over 300 million Americans.] There are a lot of smart people out there [whose judgement to manage their own lives you don't trust.] 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. [whose pockets you will pick bare] If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. [My undying gratitude to dear Mrs. Arp, who encouraged my writing back in 8th grade does not negate my subsequent efforts nor entitle you to transfer my earnings to unconstitutional initiatives.] Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. [That would be the Founders, whose work you have made it your life's work to undo.] Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business -- you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.
While both Ms. Warren and Mr. Obama start out largely in sync, at the end of his remarks, the inertia of the President's hyperbole sweeps him clean off the reservation where he lands on his rump and blames George Bush. To say that economic cooperation in the form of infrastructure, for example, helps provide the conditions in which entrepreneurs can thrive is a reasonable supposition. But to leap from that to the proposition that it wasn't the entrepreneur who built his own business is 32/32's nonsense. Who put their savings and future at risk? Who is responsible for payroll? Who pays the light bill, the property taxes, the licenses and fees, the rent, the insurance? Who gets the bloody tax bill from you, Mr. President? Somebody else? And to insinuate that there is no discernible difference between paying for police, fire, and roads, and subsidizing federally funded solar panel boondoggles at the point of the IRS's gun is to add insult to incoherence.
The President neglects to mention that "somebody else" is there with the entrepreneur, every step of the way. When someone steps out to build a business, someone is there demanding an environmental impact study. If and when the entrepreneur is actually permitted to build a business, that someone will be there to check for the proper licenses, credentials, fees, ad nauseum. And when that businessman earns a dollar, that same someone will be there to collect his portion under threat of force. Actually, that last statement isn't quite true. The government won't be there to collect their portion, because Barack Obama believes that it is all the government's portion. The government just decides what portion the business owner is allowed to keep, which is why he keeps referring to tax cuts as government expenditures.
The business of demonizing productive people and fomenting envy between Americans is, alas, not very profitable. People don't risk their future to go broke, and so they look elsewhere prompting President Hopey Changey to blame outsourcing on, ...Mitt Romney? The man who was creating jobs when Barack Obama was smoking weed? The man who Obama's surrogate accuses of being a felon when it's as obvious as his wife's belated pride in her country that if Romney had been a felon, he would have been invited to Obama's inner circle along with Rezko and Ayers?
Mr. President, somebody else built this country, not you. Other people fought for it and saved it, not you. Other people made this the freest, most prosperous nation in all of human history, not you. It wasn't yours to fundamentally transform. You have no constitutional power to do so. Your oath requires that you make sure the laws are faithfully executed. You swore an oath to uphold the Constitution, and you have abrogated that oath. No one else did that for you… you did it on your own. And you will be held accountable at the ballot box in November because, despite your best efforts, the concept of personal accountability still remains.
- Comment (41)
- · Quote
- · UnfollowFollow (3)
Comments:
Mar '11
Re: Separated At Birth?
Separated at birth? No: Siamese twins. No matter the genetic material put in the petri dish of academe, the "products of deception" are the same.
Jun '12
Re: Separated At Birth?
You Da Man, Mr. Carter, you Da Man!
Aug '11
Re: Separated At Birth?
Awesome ranty goodness!
Apr '11
Re: Separated At Birth?
Their views are 180 degrees out from the Declaration of Independence. It only took 200 years to get from the pursuit of happiness and the love of liberty to "you didn't build that" and all our money belongs to the state. I guess F. A. Hayek was right after all. There is a tendency in society to drift away from liberty and it is left to people like us to try and stop the drift.
Jun '10
Re: Separated At Birth?
Dave Carter
I agree with everything.
Joseph Epstein once said that the best writing is in the parentheses and brackets. More proof here.
Edited on July 17, 2012 at 5:22pmMay '10
Re: Separated At Birth?
Great point! Shame no one has noted the relationship between Obama's comment and Elizabeth Warren's before ... oh, wait: http://ricochet.com/main-feed/Somebody-Made-That-Happen/(comment)/402441#comment-402441 8^)
Your rant still needed to be said, Dave, and well done. I love the fact that this is still an active conversation topic many days after Sir Golfsalot said it.
edit: hey, links don't automatically link!
Edited on July 17, 2012 at 5:30pmSep '10
Re: Separated At Birth?
Waitress?
I'll have exactly what the gentleman in the truck is having for dinner. Better yet: make it a double helping.
Fabulous Fisc(k)ulus Privatus, Dave.
Re: Separated At Birth?
That. Was. Awesome.
Sep '11
Re: Separated At Birth?
What she said.
Hard to pick a favorite part, other than the last paragraph, but I think I am going with:
"Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that [has] allowed you to thrive. [That would be the Founders, whose work you have made it your life's work to undo.] "
Edited on July 17, 2012 at 5:51pmJun '10
Re: Separated At Birth?
You will notice that both haters in the above photo are products of "higher" education. Tell me in what other line of employment can a person work 32 weeks per year, 15-20 hours per week, have a staff of helots (aka grad students) to do the dirty work, get generous sabbaticals, and still get paid for a full time job? I have to conclude that academia draws people who have no respect for hard work, nor any personal work ethic of their own. Yet they lord their superior position over the rest of us who do. They are frauds. Should we be at all surprised to find that their biographies are an exercise in fiction? Then to top it all off they spread their hatred of country and tradition to impressionable undergraduates who don't know any better. There is something deeply rotten in our institutions of higher learning.
Sep '10
Re: Separated At Birth?
That's the Chicago Way.
Feb '12
Re: Separated At Birth?
You, sir, can post.
Maybe they can both move to their dream city, Brazillia.
Edited on July 17, 2012 at 6:07pmRe: Separated At Birth?
If I had 5 minutes to tell the President anything I wanted, I would read him your post, Dave.
May '10
Re: Separated At Birth?
This needs to be spread and seen more places than here. How do you make a paragraph go viral?
Edited on July 17, 2012 at 6:20pmJul '12
Re: Separated At Birth?
Dave, you need a much bigger venue for your writing.
Being able to write that was one of the top reasons for my joining.
Sep '10
Re: Separated At Birth?
Eric Voegelin: Dave, you need a much bigger venue for your writing.
Being able to write that was one of the top reasons for my joining. · 7 minutes ago
Amen.
Dec '11
Re: Separated At Birth?
They also are both affirmative action beneficiaries and race grievance hucksters, too. Both of them are extremely dishonest. Both express themselves only with cliches. And yet, only one of them is "likable" .
May '11
Re: Separated At Birth?
Doug? Doug Kimball?
Don't miss the chance to get in on Dave's great post!
Jul '10
Re: Separated At Birth?
You spell it out so clearly, Dave. Thank you. It's going to my Facebook page, which should produce some good comments from my very few lib friends. Guaranteed they'll bring up Bush somewhere in their comments. It's so predictable because they have no other answer to the disaster that is upon us.
Rush made an interesting point to the effect that it wasn't the fact that there were paved roads that made Henry Ford decide to build cars. The car production business created the need for the roads.
May '12
Re: Separated At Birth?
Most Outstanding!!!
Are you my brother? How do you know what I feel?