We Are In This Together
Unless you've been living under a rock with ear plugs in, you've heard President Obama's statements in Virginia regarding job creators. After careful analysis using the latest scientific technology, we have concluded that those remarks could have only come after a night of very heavy drinking from the speech writing staff.
Sorry, I usually don't allow that kind of mean spirited language in the articles. However, you cannot look at the speech in question and wonder anything other than the color of the sky on the planet that the writer(s) spend most of their time. Still, we will go through it piece by piece and show that it gets stranger as you read on.
First, lets assume that everyone has heard the main thrust of the speech - that successful people got that way not because of their intellect or hard work, but because someone somewhere sacrificed for them. We're going to gloss over the fact that Senator Obama's primary resume for President was that he ran a successful campaign. The sheer irony of a man who is in his position only because of his ability to get other people to do something using that position to criticize people who built their own companies may cause me to go on a binge similar to the one the speech writers must have had the night they wrote this dandy of a tale.
Let's get the train going:
In fact, you know what. I'm not gonna see us gut the investments that grow our economy to give tax breaks that go to me or Mr Romney or folks that don't need them. So I'm gonna reduce the deficit in a balanced way. We've already made a trillion dollars in cuts, we can make another trillion or trillion point two, and what we then do is ask for the wealthy to pay a little bit more.And by the way, we've tried that before ... a guy named Bill Clinton did it. We created 23 million new jobs. Turned a deficit into a surplus, and rich people did just fine. We created a lot of millionaires.And you know there are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me, cuz they wanna give something back. They know that they didn't ... 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 that think that "wow, 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 everyone else." Let me tell you something, there are a whole bunch of hard working people out there.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, that .. you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.
This is the portion of the speech that has been receiving the most attention. The implications of these words are staggering. The President is openly arguing that people with wealth have those possessions only because of the sacrifice of others, This sacrifice could be done to teach you in school or to build roads for your company. Either way, someone else contributed to your company and has not been rewarded in the same manner as you have. If there was ever a case for property and wealth confiscation, this is it. You're only wealthy because somebody else made it happen and now it's time to pay those people back.
And by people, I mean government, and by government, I mean me.
I cannot imagine a greater took to hand an enemy that wants to frame you as a socialist than a segment of tape where you are practically declaring yourself a socialist. Apparenlty, the proof readers were all needed for the keg stands and no one else thought this little nugget of truth would be used against them in the future.
Not only is it scary, it's just silly logic. Businesses are not the result of roads, roads are the response of the bureacracy to business success. No city ever decides to build roads where there is no need merely to provide for future business opportunity some day in the future. No business owner ever approaches a section of road and decides to open a business merely because infrastrucutre is in place. A need must first exist,
That need prompts the opening of a business and the business prompts the local government to build a road. Sure, it is the government that builds it, but it uses the taxes from the new business and surrounding companies to build those roads. In this case, the government is acting no differently than privately hired companies. It is not acting out of benevolence, but merely responding to the needs of the custormer.
This is the key facet that President Obama and those speech writers aparently don't understand. People only participate in business when it benefits them. No one "gives" anyone anything for free. Sure, parents may lend their children start up money, wives or husbands may fund their spouse's internet ventures from home (wink), and venture capitalists may fund companies, but each of these is done with the expectation of a return on that investment, financial or otherwise, and each of the people involved is taking risk. Of these entities, government is the least benevolent as it only creates infrasructure after a company is successful and only under the condition that it will recieve its money through threat of imprisonment.
Continuing on down the road ...
The internet didn't get created on its own. Government research created the internet so that all the companies could make money off the internet.
Man, if I hear one more person who doesn't understand how the internet works describe to me how the government "created" the internet, I'm gonna dig up my internet tubes and clog them with socks while cursing Al Gore's name.
Yes, DARPA funded projects that pionered ways for computers to talk to each other and display data for the user. Yes, these steps led to the internet protocols. No, there was no point in time where a group of government funded researchers approached a business and said "Hey, look what we made. Cool huh. Feel free to use it."
Finally, there mere existence of those protocols did not mean that it was inevitable that the internet would be what it is today. It took entrepreneurs seeing the world that was to come taking risks through either capital or time to invest in products that would eventually become what we have today.
Moving along again ...
The point is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There's some things, just like fighting fires that we don't do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That'd be a hard way to organize fighting fires. So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, "you know what, there's some things that we do better together." That's how we funded the GI Bill, that's how we created the middle class, that's how we built the Golden Gate bridge and the Hoover Dam. That's how we invented the internet, that's how we sent a man to the moon.
This is the second most important portion of the speech because it highlights the truly stunning amount of alcohol that must have been present when the speech writers decided to buckle down and drive this speech home. Dear Mr President, fire fighting is a public function because if fire stations were privately funded, you would have a lot of fire fighters running around establishing a market for their services. As such, the motivation to fund them publicly was not a moment of zen in which we realized that it was easier for Kurt Russell and William Baldwin to beat the fires when they acted together. It was the obvious acknowledgement that indeed some things should not be market driven.
Apparently, the speech writers also decided that cigars don't go well with Jager Bombs and Whiskey. Had they decided differently, they would have noticed the small white object peeping just above the sound of the Dead Kennedys and the intern puking in the hall way. That noise would have been coming from the smoke detector - that privately funded object designed to make up for the long arrival time for the fire department and allow everyone to exit safely. Somewhere, an entrepreneur saw a need and filled it.
I'm not even going to address the "That's how we invented teh interwebs" statement.
Someone stop this bus ...
We rise and fall together as one nation and as one people, and that's the reason I am running for President, because I still believe in that idea. You're not on your own, we're in this together,
Not sure if I would blame this one on hangovers, jello shots, or the dog eating the speech. It literally seems that the President of the United States is not aware that he is ... well, the President. That's why this section is the most important part of that speech. He's still campaigning. He still doesn't understand that when he talks about overcoming the malaise, when he talks about overcoming past policies, when he talks about moving on, he's talking about moving on from his Presidency, his malaise, and his policies. He's running for President because he feels that he can do a better job than the guy in office. He needs a drink.