President Obama goes the extra mile to portray every successful person as being just a pawn in the hands of vast, impersonal forces of destiny:
Look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. 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. (Applause.)
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.
The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.
The “Leader of the Free World”, folks! Let’s give him a hand! (Applause.)
Elizabeth Warren may have said it first in this election campaign, but nobody will top Barack Obama’s reworking of her theme.
Update: Matt Welch on Obama’s Golden Gate Bridge shaggy dog story:
In President Barack Obama’s fairly maligned “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that” comments the other day, he also said this:
When we invested in the Hoover Dam or the Golden Gate Bridge, or the Internet, sending a man to the moon — all those things benefited everybody. And so that’s the vision that I want to carry forward.
To which the engineer W.J.J. Hoge replied:
The federal government did build Hoover Dam. However, the Golden Gate Bridge was funded by a $35 million dollar bond issue by the six counties in the Golden Gate Bridge District. It was a state-authorized project built by a partnership of local governments.
What’s more, the conservative commentator Thomas Purcell asserted last November (Obama having been playing the Golden Gate card for a while now), “it was the ‘One Percenters’, as is the term coined of the rich and powerful these days, that built the Golden Gate, not government. More importantly, it was government that posed more obstacles for the building of the bridge than any other entity and if the Department of Defense had their way it never would have been built at all.”
Update, the second: LauraW at Ace of Spades H.Q. dissents from the President’s easy dismissal of individual effort.
One very offensive thing about Elizabeth Warren’s and Obama’s statement that ‘no businessperson is successful alone, other people made them that way,’ is the complete discounting of risk (and hard work). Risk is nearly the whole game. The whole thing, this entire American enterprise, rests on people who are willing to take a risk.
Where, in either of their diatribes, do they acknowledge the (often terribly high) risk required by individual enterprise?
Worse, they fail to mention the people that risk it all, who LOSE. They pretend those people don’t exist. The false assumption behind both these clowns’ statements, is that the successful were guaranteed to be so, by a helpful public sector. But we know that’s not actually how things go. Most ventures fail.
That bears repeating! Most ventures fail. And not for a lack of roads and bureaucrats.
There’s no end to the stupid things you can get people to believe about business, when you omit that very important fact from your considerations.
The government wants to say you didn’t really earn what you earned? They want you to hand it over because they believe the public owns part of it? Ok then; who shares the downside with you, when you lose your ass? Does the public own part of your failure, too?
Yes, they let you own some percentage of the success, and all the failure. They want to win both ways. They want to say you’ve rolled the dice, and you’ve lost fair and square, and you’re on your own, when you lose. But then they also want to say, you won and that’s not fair, so pay us, when you win.
That didn’t take long at all: http://didntbuildthat.com/.
Comment by Nicholas — July 17, 2012 @ 16:33
Another collection of “You didn’t build that” captions at The Whited Sepulchre.
Comment by Nicholas — July 18, 2012 @ 09:55