The Romney campaign and the talking heads on the lunatic right continue to use words taken out of context to try to bloody Barack Obama. The problem is that to date the individuals chosen to be highlighted in ads attacking Obama time and time gain turn out to have enjoyed government assistance - sometimes lots of it - in building their businesses. The truth is that many of us receive government assistance be it in the form of tax incentives, grants or even government transportation programs that make one's business more competitive. There usually is no free lunch. And that's not to say that successful business owners don't put in a great deal of blood, sweat and tears in creating a successful business. All I'm saying, is that if one looks, there's also often some government policy in play. A column in the Washington Post looks at this reality. Here are some highlights:
My boyhood friend Jack became a doctor — and a conservative. He had gone to public schools, attended college with the help of a government scholarship, went to medical school on the Army’s dime, and learned his specialty in military hospitals. He insisted that the government had done nothing for him. In that way, he is both the soul and the wit of the Republican Party.
It was in rebuttal to the Jacks of this world that Barack Obama earlier this month updated John Donne’s “No man is an island” by knocking the idea that individual success is always the product of individual qualities, such as industriousness: “Let me tell you something: There are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.”
This observation, so obvious you’d think it didn’t have to be stated, was then followed by what became a gotcha sound bite: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.
The entire GOP, including its claque in the press, pounced. You would have thought Obama had just belittled self-discipline and other virtues and quoted from “Das Kapital” or, even worse, a ditty by Pete Seeger. To his critics, Obama’s version of It Takes a Village was further proof of his commie creds, possibly Islamic as well.
Of course, the president has nothing but truth and history on his side. Every schoolchild in my neck of the woods learned that the Erie Canal, which made New York truly the Empire State, was government-funded — $7 million appropriated at the insistence of Gov. DeWitt Clinton. The railroads did not come from nowhere and neither did the ports or the highway system.
Across the mighty ocean, the Economist magazine has taken note of this debate over the role of government and pronounced it healthy in principle but pathetic in execution. Both the right and the left have trivialized this important issue, but conservatives have gone from simplistic formulas to bravely idiotic ones. “American conservatism has grown so angry that it has become a parody of its former self,” the magazine says. “Tax cuts are always right (even if they inflate the deficit); government activism is always wrong (even if stimulus helped avert a depression). And the right’s hypocrisy when it comes to spending on conservative projects (prisons, the armed forces, subsidies to big business) is breathtaking.
As the Economist notes, this is not a trivial debate. The refusal of the contemporary Republican Party to acknowledge a role for government is linked to an illogical determination never to raise taxes. Obama may be too liberal for some, but the alternative that Romney offers by parroting the conservative GOP line is simply not credible. Prosperity may not always take a village, but it sure doesn’t take the village idiot.
2 comments:
I get so tired of both sides going to what ever extremes they can manufacture or envision. Somehow though you never seem to seem the extremes that the liberal mindset routinely conjures up.
I have been an extremely successful man. I stand on the shoulders of my Mom, my Dad and a few teachers along the way who taught me valuable lessons. Without these people in my life, I would not be what I am today.
Admittedly, I went to a state college, not a private ivy league institution. I drove to that school on highways paid for with state and Federal tax dollars and I enjoyed the benefits of infrastructure of all kinds paid for with state and Federal tax dollars.
At the time, as a young man just getting started I had paid very little in taxes. Now as an older very successful man, I have paid AT LEAST my share of taxes. In fact for quite some time my largest single expense each year has been taxes. I spend more on taxes than I spend on housing, transportation, food or anything else.
Since 50% of Americans now pay no Federal Income Tax at all, I pay my share and I pay their share as well as do other financially successful people.
I had not one bit of trouble with Obama saying none of us got where we are without help from others. That is a simple fact. No one stands alone in his success.
But the next statement was shear lunacy. "If you have a successful business, you didn't build that. Someone else built that." That is simply BS.
While I stood on the shoulders of others and while I used government infrastructure, I worked my ass off for my success. I sacrificed many yesterdays for the success I enjoy today.
Continued on second comment
Jack Scott
Part II
As an older man I can look back now at many of my high school friends who also had the same teachers, who had supportive parents and the same government infrastructure to use that I did. Some of these friends are even more successful than I. Some have almost nothing. Those of us who have built what we have through personal ambition and hard work. Those who now have nothing simply refused to do the work.
Every country in the world has government infrastructure. Every person in the world has some kind of support. Of course all is not equal and never will be but the point is that no matter how much government support one has or how much backing from others, one will never be a success unless and until he decides to build his own success. Obama simply does not understand that and it is not the picture of America in which he believes.
Instead he wants an America where the field is leveled and all are equal. An America in which there are no poor and no rich, a classless American in which all are strictly equal.
There is, I guess, nothing wrong with that dream of his. It's just not an American Dream. Everyone would like to have a BMW or Lexus in their garage. Everyone would like to live in a mansion with all the luxuries of life. Too many Americans do not now understand that those things must be earned. They cannot be handed out to everyone by the government.
The founding Fathers never guaranteed equality to Americans. They tried to insure equality of opportunity. We'll always be trying to achieve that goal. We'll never really reach it. But in the mean time Americans of every race and color have reached out and embraced the equality of opportunity.
I live in a very affluent community. My neighbors are white, black, hispanic. What they have in common is they built their success through hard work and sacrifice. The blacks in my community did not feel that doing well in school would make them white. They did not fall into the trap of feeling they were owed something because their ancestors were slaves.
The hispanics in my community did not seem themselves as Mexicans or South Americans. They saw themselves as Texans in a land of opportunity and they seized that opportunity.
Under Obama more and more people of every race and color have chosen to quit trying and simply depend on the government to support them.
Opportunity has to be seized. Success has to be earned. Ambition has to come from within one's very heart and soul. None of these things can be supplied by government.
Jack scott
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