{Note: I’m specifically picking on Liberals today, for two reasons, namely that the gaffes on the Right are too blatant to waste space over, and that these days the Left, being in charge, is America’s primary bane of dangerous nonsense.}
Obama’s “You didn’t build that, somebody else made that happen” comment is the latest big [[meme]] de la rage.
He Didn’t Say That
Before it could be wiped off the proverbial fan, damage control was in full swing, with people saying it was “out of context” all the while defending it with arguments that prove it wasn’t. There’s obviously some deep-seated confusion on the part of the DNC spinners — they are living under the delusion that if people understood what he/they mean, people would not be offended or disagree because such beliefs are undeniably true. In this case, they dug deeper while those who understood it are more and more validated, saying “yeah, that’s what I thought he meant.”
The tried-and-true scapegoat of the Left, [[FOX News]], was accused of snippetizing Obama’s comments like some [[Michael Moore]] fraudumentary. During the writing of this article, ironically, the first link on Google to access the whole transcript is from one of their affiliate sites. And I heard the pertinent section in full on my wife’s radio via [[Rush Limbaugh]]. This is yet another example of people who don’t watch or listen to FOX spreading gossip about what they did or didn’t say, and over the years people have truly and prolifically taken Rush … drum roll please … OUT OF CONTEXT.
This game is nothing new. When they couldn’t sell their nightmare healthcare “reform”, Democrats blamed it on not being able to properly educate the public on what it meant, never thinking that maybe that wasn’t the problem at all. They are ever confounded why people would vote “against their best interests”, since their solutions are so obviously the right choice and no one could possibly see it another way unless they didn’t get it. Then entered Pelosi with the 2nd Place gaffe, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it”. It also reminds me of Bill Clinton’s Honorable Mention gaffe a few years back about tax breaks, “We could give more money to the people but they wouldn’ t know how to spend it.” And the list of contenders continues, right down to blaming Bush “Forever” …
The painful lesson is if you think it’s bad when politicians lie, just wait until they’re honest with you.
Conclusion: He DID say it.
He Didn’t Mean That
The context of Obama’s comment isn’t the problem. No business is built in a vacuum; no one succeeds entirely by himself, without some help or mentor. And no one is offended by such a sensible notion.
If he would have stopped there, he could have gotten away with it. He didn’t say businesses should give some credit to society — he said a business owner cannot take credit, and it must go to someone else. REALLY?
Did “somebody else” work 100+ hours per week and possibly risk life savings to be able to put together a workforce to meet the needs of a market? Did somebody else “create” these jobs? Did somebody else have to juggle regulatory issues and the constant fear of lawsuits in a frivolously litigious society? Did somebody else co-sign the lease or mortgage? Did somebody else find investors? Did somebody else turn grant money or SBA loans into real, profitable economic value?
This would be like saying the farmer can’t take credit for his harvest. The rain did it. They guy who invented the tractor is responsible. He couldn’t have done it without arable soil. He didn’t MAKE the plants grow. He didn’t create people’s hunger. He only helped while Mother nature did all the work, right? This is moronic, yet being argued. THis is nothing more than pure rationalization because if that’s what Obama meant, then he can’t give credit to anybody for anything in society and the entire opinion is subjectively meaningless.
No, he meant somebody “made it happen” all right, just not (heaven forbid) the person who actually made it happen.
Conclusion: He DID mean that.
He Doesn’t Think That
The worst part of all this is that some of us saw it for what it was immediately and plain as day — pandering to the “working class” with textbook Marxism. Right out of Das Kapital, he places the credit for all success on the workers INSTEAD of the employers, as if the latter should not merely acknowledge the former’s role, but that they OWE something to them. But let’s look at this more closely, shall we?
The most commonly sputtered argument goes that businesses can only exist because government built the roads the rest of us paid for. Of course this is a three-stage lie of biblical proportions. First, businesses often precede infrastructure and are the impetus for it, no matter how much they may take advantage for existing infrastructure at any snapshot in time. Second, businesses directly built much of America’s infrastructure, from the railroads to entire communities (company towns). They often pay for extending municipal roads and utilities to remote areas that would not other wise have any or even become settled. Third, government “didn’t build that” — they pay private contractors using tax money, a large portion of which are corporate taxes. Yes, businesses pay their share in tax dollars to the point they pay more toward infrastructure than they use, benefiting the rest of us, not the other way around. (If you don’t believe this, either do the research yourself or buy a calculator.)
But let’s look closer at the specific example Obama used — the Internet.
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.
Saying the Internet we know today was created by DARPA, though technically correct in it’s most vague sense, is like saying the Lamborghini isn’t the product of Italian engineering, only Ford’s ingenuity a hundred years since. If it were not for commercial investment (including the porn industry to no small extent) the Internet would still be in black-and-white (or green, rather) and used as a glorified teletype for the military and a glorified fax machine for universities and physics laboratories. For the general public, it would be an obscure hobby at best, and we must not forget it was hobbyists that created things like Windows and Apple, based on unrealized Blue Chip company technology the Defense Department didn’t even have interest in. And without these, there would be no color, no sound, no video, not even serifs on our digital fonts.
Therefore, the Internet is in fact the best possible example of what the government did NOT create but would like to take credit for — the collective efforts of a vast private sector to create what the Pentagon never could have dreamed of. It might even be the government’s ultimate undoing … or conversely our grand-kids may learn that DARPA invented the airplane as well someday.
Now for the more abstract proponents of Obama’s (and Marx’s) view, we hear that it is the society itself (and by such people is wrongheadedly meant to be synonymous with government) that provides the conditions that people can be successful. The farmer analogy above easily indicts this intellectual offense, but let’s take it a step further if we want to meet it on it’s own abstract level:
Saying society and/or government created the conditions for thriving business is like saying animals are only alive and well because of zoos. The fact is that businesses ARE society in a fundamental economic sense, and governments are impositioners, not enablers. The very concepts of “licenses” and “permits” are boldface euphemisms, since it does not enable anyone to do anything — only do it lawfully so that it is thereby made illegal under all all circumstances. Government’s power here is to allow by forbidding.
The bottom line is that allowing a business to exist doesn’t morally demand any “thank you” notes to anybody, at least not in anything resembling free market and free society. Defending the right to a free market and society is another story (eternal thanks to our vets), but such things benefit employers and employed alike. So one may thank the fairgrounds and sponsors for holding the rodeo, and the sheriff for security duty, but when it comes to the entertainment and winners, the cowboys did that, not somebody else.
So when Obama offended business owners, it was for exactly the above reasons, not because it was out of context or misunderstood. His ideological roots showed through. Like many others to the far Left, he is living in a world where we ought to redistribute to the workers who helped but didn’t build that the full measure of praise and reward the rest of us recognize due the workers (business owners) who did.
Conclusion: He DOES think that.