Disrupting the Narrative of the New Left, its allies in Academia, Hollywood and the Establishment Media, and examining with honesty the goals of cultural Marxism and the dangers of reactionary and abusive political correctness.
THE NARRATIVE AND POLITICAL CORRECTNESS
“Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.”-George Orwell
Showing posts with label blaming America. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blaming America. Show all posts
It's been over a week since Barack Obama delivered his off-prompture speech in Virginia in which he took some deliberate shots at the free-enterprise, entrepreneurial spirit of America and turned it into a punchline. Normally I would have simply created a link to the excellent article below but Charles Krauthammer does such a magnificent job of refuting Obama that I wanted to make it available in its entirety on this site because I think it's that important. Below the article is the Romney campaign's rapid first response. But first, please have a look at the video below in which Bill Whittle gives his own views on what it is about Obama that makes him so out of touch - and indeed hostile - when it comes to mainstream Americans.
DID THE STATE MAKE YOU GREAT? By Charles Krauthammer, Published: July 19
"If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen."
— Barack Obama, Roanoke, Va., July 13
And who might that somebody else be? Government, says Obama.
It built the roads you drive on. It provided the teacher who inspired
you. It “created the Internet.” It represents the embodiment of “we’re
in this together” social solidarity that, in Obama’s view, is the
essential origin of individual and national achievement.
To say
that all individuals are embedded in and the product of society is
banal. Obama rises above banality by means of fallacy: equating society
with government, the collectivity with the state. Of course we are
shaped by our milieu. But the most formative, most important influence
on the individual is not government. It is civil society, those elements
of the collectivity that lie outside government: family, neighborhood,
church, Rotary club, PTA, the voluntary associations that Tocqueville
understood to be the genius of America and source of its energy and
freedom.
Moreover, the greatest threat to a robust, autonomous
civil society is the ever-growing Leviathan state and those like Obama
who see it as the ultimate expression of the collective.
Obama
compounds the fallacy by declaring the state to be the font of
entrepreneurial success. How so? It created the infrastructure — roads,
bridges, schools, Internet — off which we all thrive.
Absurd. We
don’t credit the Swiss postal service with the Special Theory of
Relativity because it transmitted Einstein’s manuscript to the Annalen der Physik. Everyone drives the roads, goes to school, uses the mails. So did Steve Jobs. Yet only he created the Mac and the iPad.
Obama’s
infrastructure argument is easily refuted by what is essentially a
controlled social experiment. Roads and schools are the constant. What’s
variable is the energy, enterprise, risk-taking, hard work and genius
of the individual. It is therefore precisely those individual
characteristics, not the communal utilities, that account for the
different outcomes.
The ultimate Obama fallacy, however, is the
conceit that belief in the value of infrastructure — and willingness to
invest in its creation and maintenance — is what divides liberals from
conservatives.
More nonsense. Infrastructure is not a liberal
idea, nor is it particularly new. The Via Appia was built 2,300 years
ago. The Romans built aqueducts, too. And sewers. Since forever,
infrastructure has been consensually understood to be a core function of
government.
The argument between left and right is about what you do beyond
infrastructure. It’s about transfer payments and redistributionist
taxation, about geometrically expanding entitlements, about tax breaks
and subsidies to induce actions pleasing to central planners. It’s about
free contraceptives for privileged students and welfare without work
— the latest Obama entitlement-by-decree that would fatally undermine
the great bipartisan welfare reform of 1996. It’s about endless
government handouts that, ironically, are crowding out necessary
spending on, yes, infrastructure.
What divides liberals and conservatives is not roads and bridges but Julia’s world,
an Obama campaign creation that may be the most self-revealing parody
of liberalism ever conceived. It’s a series of cartoon illustrations in
which a fictional Julia is swaddled and subsidized throughout her life
by an all- giving government of bottomless pockets and “Queen for a Day”
magnanimity. At every stage, the state is there to provide — preschool
classes and cut-rate college loans, birth control and maternity care,
business loans and retirement. The only time she’s on her own is at her
grave site.
Julia’s world is totally atomized. It contains no
friends, no community and, of course, no spouse. Who needs one? She’s
married to the provider state.
Or to put it slightly differently,
the “Life of Julia” represents the paradigmatic Obama political
philosophy: citizen as orphan child. For the conservative, providing for
every need is the duty that government owes to actual orphan children.
Not to supposedly autonomous adults.
Beyond infrastructure, the
conservative sees the proper role of government as providing not
European-style universal entitlements but a firm safety net, meaning
Julia-like treatment for those who really cannot make it on their own -
those too young or too old, too mentally or physically impaired, to
provide for themselves. Limited government so conceived has two
indispensable advantages. It avoids inexorable European-style national
insolvency. And it avoids breeding debilitating individual dependency.
It encourages and celebrates character, independence, energy, hard work
as the foundations of a free society and a thriving economy — precisely
the virtues Obama discounts and devalues in his accounting of the
wealth of nations.
