Obama’s ‘If You’ve Got A Business, You Didn’t Build That’ Is Incoherent Marxist Pabulum. Period.

Obama was campaigning in Roanoke, Virginia when this little “spread the wealth around” beauty popped out of him.  (And keep in mind this came out of “a man who never created or ran so much as a candy store”).

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back.  They know they didn’t — 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.

So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, you know what, there are some things 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 or the Hoover Dam.  That’s how we invented the Internet.  That’s how we sent a man to the moon.  We rise or fall together as one nation and as one people, and that’s the reason I’m running for President — because I still believe in that idea.  You’re not on your own, we’re in this together.  (Applause.)

So all these issues go back to that first campaign that I talked about, because everything has to do with how do we help middle-class families, working people, strivers, doers — how do we help them succeed?  How do we make sure that their hard work pays off?  That’s what I’ve been thinking about the entire time I’ve been President.

Now, over the next four months, the other side is going to spend more money than we’ve even seen in history.  And they don’t really have a good argument for how they would do better, but they’re thinking they can win the election if they just remind people that a lot of people are still out of work, and the economy is not growing as fast as it needs to, and it’s all Obama’s fault.  That’s basically their pitch.

The spirit of Obama’s words boils down to EXACTLY what I said about this demon-possessed man in a piece I wrote nearly two years ago titled “Obama’s Government As God Believes It Owns Everything The People Earn.”  To wit: we owe the government EVERYTHING.  We are NOTHING without the government; we are ENTIRELY produced and shaped by government and we could do absolutely nothing to better ourselves apart from politicians and bureaucrats.  The only difference between rich, successful people and poor, unsuccessful people is that the former are better at taking advantage of the benefits of government.  And therefore the Government frankly ought to basically own us and it own absolutely everything we produce – such that whatever the Government DOESN’T take in taxes from us is literally considered a COST to Government.   But Government in its deity is gracious and mercifully allows us otherwise pathologically helpless descendents of monkeys to keep some of what we earned entirely because of all the many Government blessings.

Obama’s remark produces this question: is America a people who have a government or is America a government that has a people?  Obama very firmly believes the latter.

Let me first explain why Obama’s words are just incoherent pabulum.  Obama starts yapping about roads and bridges that were built by government.  But there’s an obvious question: where did the government get the funds to build those roads and bridges?  And is it seriously Obama’s assertion that “the Government” climbed aboard the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria and was the very first entity to stride onto the beach of the New World???

What came first, the chicken or the egg?  I don’t know what YOUR answer is, but Obama’s answer is “The Government came first, and that’s all that really matters.”

Obama’s rant depends entirely upon the assumption that government didn’t even exist at all until Karl Marx invented it.  It depends upon the straw man demagoguery that Republicans are nihilistic anarchists who have actually been trying to dissolve all government.  It depends on the narrative that only Democrats and only Obama want to have ANY government at all.  And that is why quite literally every single success of government in history actually becomes the result of Obama’s policies that Republicans want to stop.

It’s an incredibly weak and idiotic point, and so it isn’t that surprising that Obama would reach to some profoundly contradictory examples to try to substantiate it.

Government gave us the internet.  So of course therefore rich people should be taxed at whatever the hell rate Obama says they should.

Well, “government” didn’t create the internet.  In actual point of fact, the Department of Defense created the internet.  This is a significant distinction because while Obama is massively expanding “Government,” he is in fact annihilating the actual department that created the internet:

“The President signed and supported cuts in the defense budget of close to a trillion dollars that his own Secretary of Defense has said—we’re talking about Leon Panetta, here—are devastating to the military and equivalent to shooting ourselves in the head. This was done with no strategic analysis of the needs of national security and no plan for how to implement the cuts. Even now we don’t know the details of how the cuts are going to be implemented. We do know that they’re planning to cut 200,000 troops. Given the state of the economy, it’s equivalent to laying them off and the military is sending them to the unemployment lines.”

Fact: Obama has said that he will veto any attempt to roll back the massive cuts to the military that gave us the internet.

Fact: Somewhere between 1.1 and 1.5 MILLION defense industry jobs are going to be lost if Obama gets his way and the trillion-dollar cuts of sequestration gut the military that gave us the internet.

Fact: the military didn’t build the damn internet “so that all the companies could make money off the Internet,” you damn disgrace to the presidency; the military built the internet to network computers so that the United States could further protect itself against attack and regain a technological edge that had been lost to the Russians.

[Update, July 23: Even I didn’t realize how wrong Obama was.  It turns out it wasn’t even the MILITARY that created the internet; it was private sector innovators who paved the way to the internet].

Obama says, “That’s how we sent a man to the moon.”  That was a good thing, was it?

I’ve written a couple of articles about the utter and complete devastation to NASA that has befallen that agency in “the age of Obama.”

Space Program: Obama’s Strategy To Turn America Into Banana Republic Moving Like Clockwork

When American Greatness Is Gone, And When NASA = ‘National Aeronautics and Sharia Administration’

Lest We Forget: OBAMA Is America’s Sputnik Moment

Right now, as it stands, Obama has OUTSOURCED the government sector that put a man on the moon TO THE DAMN RUSSIANS.  Obama canceled NASA’s space program and now we are paying the Russians something like $63 million per seat to go into space.  And Obama threw the men and women who basically put that man on the moon that he boasted about out of work.

You need to understand, Obama’s never-before-seen expansion of government into Government isn’t going to create the next internet and it won’t put the first man on Mars.  Rather, it will put a man on his couch on permanent welfare for life as long as he votes Democrat and as long as we don’t run out of somebody else’s money.  Obama’s Government is only intended to massively, MASSIVELY, MASSIVELY expand government dependency of a class of redistribution-loving welfare-sucking pigmy people.  Obama’s policy is not the means to the next great thing; it is the END of greatness.

When Obama pitches roads and bridges and the Hoover Damn and the Golden Gate Bridge, you can actually decipher that as code for “Barack Obama is the most recklessly failed leader who ever lived.”  Remember the “storytelling” that Obama relied on to sell his massive $862 billion stimulus that will actually cost the American people $3.27 TRILLION?  “Shovel-ready jobs”???  Remember that???  Obama’s “storytelling” now is just the same damn bogus “storytelling” he has been selling since he passed that turd stimulus: “Let’s Spend Billions to Fix What the Stimulus Was Supposed to Fix.”  So we went from the “story” of “shovel-ready jobs” to the new “storyline” of “Shovel-ready was not as … uh .. shovel-ready as we expected.” to the next “storyline” of “construction workers ready to get dirty right now.”

Let me just round file that “storytelling” into a “How the hell can you be that stupid?” alert.

Obama wants to take credit for public schools, does he?  The public education system has utterly and comprehensively failed American children who are left “waiting for Superman” because government and unions have seized childrens’ futures.  The only reason that public schools continue to exist is because liberals turned the public school system into a monopoly that benefits liberals.  An organization I serve provides monthly support to a Christian private school.  That school is located in a state (California) that is in the bottom ten percentile of schools in the nation for SAT scores.  That school is located in a county (Riverside) that is in the bottom ten percentile of schools in California for SAT scores.  And that Christian school is in the ninetieth percentile in the entire nation for SAT scores.  And politicians and bureaucrats like Barack Obama WILL NOT allow parents to use their tax money to attend such a school; rather they will force most American children to rot in these government schools that are frankly more like prisons today than centers of learning.

Let me simply assure you that Barack Obama is dead frigging WRONG about “without Government there would be no schools!” and present the fact that kids who have escaped Obama’s wildly failed government schools are running circles around the mindless drones that are increasingly being pumped out by union-owned indoctrination factories a.k.a. public schools.

Public schools aren’t a blessing; they are a curse.  Even liberals like Juan Williams have decried the way Democrats have done everything possible to keep disadvantaged children from being able to escape the black hole-orbit of government schools by allowing voucher systems.  Democrats want what their teachers union campaign supporters want: a system whereby unions parasitically exploit the education system to the appalling detriment of children for their cynical political advantage.

Let’s go over the punchline of the sick, twisted, perverted joke Obama is playing on the American people again:

“If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

I’ve known quite a few people who started their own businesses.  And what I’ve encountered proves that Barack Obama is a liar without shame.  Because the small business owners I have known were people who risked virtually everything they had built in their lives to borrow enough money to start their businesses.  Because the small business owners I have known were people who worked upwards of a hundred hours a week – basically seven days a week – to get their businesses off the ground.  Because the small business owners I have known were self-made men and women who scratched and then carved out a niche for themselves with the government being FAR more of a burden and hindrance than it ever was a blessing to them.

The Washington Times has this to say about Obama’s stunning idiocy:

“If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that,” Mr. Obama continued. “Somebody else made that happen.” This claim would come as a surprise to the small-business owners who have invested their lives and life savings in making a go of it. It would be a shock to inventors and innovators who have been the drivers of America’s technological edge. It does make sense, however, coming from someone who has never had a job that didn’t depend on patronage and has spent his entire career getting ahead on identity and charisma instead of creativity and achievement.

“We succeed because we do things together,” the president chimed. He neglected to mention that lately, too much togetherness has been a source of failure. The type of relationships that help lead to success in life, the personal and professional bonds of trust and fellowship, aren’t what Mr. Obama is selling. He’s trying to pitch the idea that everyone in business should be required to take on government as a partner, with himself as a member of the board. He’s discarding the capitalist notion of free association and replacing it with the socialist idea of forced oversight by the state. The anemic economy, high unemployment and skyrocketing debt that are the products of his policies don’t deter Mr. Obama. He envisions a golden age in the future by repeating the failed policies of the past.

The government Mr. Obama worships isn’t a source of economic growth. It retards innovation, prevents jobs from being created and halts business expansion. Government under current management has become the greatest threat to initiative, creativity and wealth generation in American history. Mr. Obama thinks there is no finer force for good than his administration, but it’s a wrecking ball to prosperity. His Cabinet has the least collective private-sector experience of any Cabinet ever. This is the group that thinks unemployment checks and food stamps create jobs, that the public sector creates prosperity and that raising taxes on the productive to transfer it to the unproductive will create growth. The wonder is not that the economy is doing so poorly, but that it hasn’t collapsed altogether.

Mr. Obama has no business talking about business. He has never created anything substantive and doesn’t understand those who have made it their life’s work. This president only invented the stories and people he made up for his purported autobiography, assuming somebody else didn’t make that happen.

When you consider what small businesses really are and what they have to overcome in order to succeed, you will understand that Obama’s statements are quite simply demonic.

Update, 7/18/12: I’ve already had liberals say that “Obama didn’t say what he very clearly actually said.”  So let’s show an even clearer version of Obama’s gobblygook to see that what Obama is saying has already been spread through every single liberal roach in the nest:

Elizabeth Warren, pseudo-Native American who lied to falsely advance herself:

“I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever,’” Warren said. “No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.

“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.”

That is the SAME argument that Obama was making – and it couldn’t be clearer.  The assertion is that “nobody in this country who got rich on his own.”  Those are the exact words.  And why would Democrats say that?  Because Government built the roads, that’s why.  And therefore the Government is responsible for ALL the wealth that was created.  And therefore those who ONLY succeeded because of Government owe the Government EVERYTHING.  EVERYBODY owes the Government EVERYTHING.  Which is a statement of pure Marxism and which if taken to its logical conclusion justifes the Government in taking over EVERYTHING.

Let me give you a couple of quick examples of where evil ideas like this lead:

1) Liberals say that health care is a universal right that everyone should have and nobody (but rich people) should have to pay for.  Okay.  What about housing?  How is it that health care is a universal right but housing isn’t?  Don’t I have the right to live in a house that somebody else should have to pay for?  What about food?  Why the hell am I forced to pay for my own food when Obama should be giving it to me?  Wht about clothing?  What about transportation?  What about fuel for my transportation?  If health care is a universal right, then ALL of the others and many more things become universal rights.  Becaue there is no way in hell that you can say that everyone has the universal right to health care but nobody ought to have the universal right to housing, to food, to clothing, to transportation, etc. etc. etc.  And the logically necessary conclusion to the first “universal right” is a totalitarian Marxist state in which the State owns you and owns everything around you.

2) A particular example comes from Rahm Emanuel who is taking Obama’s abrogation of illegal immigration to the next logical level.  Obama’s former chief of staff and now Chicago Mayor Emanuel is saying that Obama didn’t go far enough in refusing to enforce federal laws that were passed by Congress and signed into law by a president of the United States.  Emanuel has an out-of-control murder rate that proves that liberalism equals lawlessness.  So he’s in a tight spot and has to get Hispanic voters on his side.  And so now he’s saying he’s more liberal than Obama; Emanuel is a better liberal who can out-liberal the liberal-in-chief.  So Emanuel will go even further in abrogating the law to win his base than Obama went to win his.  And there is simply no end to that.  Until you get to a pure Marxist State for which the Constitution and the constitutional framework of separation of powers is utterly meaningless.

To further attack Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama’s idiotic Marxist rhetoric, both the rich and the poor get to take equal advantage of all the government services.  If you call the cops, does the 911 operator ask you if you are rich and hang up on you if you’re not?  If you pull out of the driveway, does a cop demand your IRS information so that you can show that you are wealthy enough to use the damn road?  It is a LEVEL PLAYING FIELD.  And in point of fact the rich paid a much, MUCH bigger share for those roads and those police than the poor ever did.  You are simply a liar if you suggest otherwise.

But some people playing on that level playing field took independent initiative which Marxists around the world hate.  They wanted to better themselves.  And Democrats like Obama and Warren can’t have any of that.  If you take risks, buy a business, work like hell to grow that business, spend all of your energy and time investing yourself and your creativity into that business, well, to quote Obama: “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that.”  The welfare-sucking Democrat parasite deserves as much of the wealth produced by your business as you do.  Why?  Because the government built the roads and hired the police and so that business owner built nothing and therefore deserves nothing.

And you will necessarily get Marxism unless and until people start saying, “That is a lie from the devil.  We can’t go there.  We WON’T go there.  We will vote out Obama and Warren and absolutely everybody who believes the hell that they believe.”

You need to understand something: liberalism is half-ass Marxism that will be taken to full-fledge Marxism the moment the left truly is able to take power. 

There’s a problem with Marxism that few liberals bother to think about in their Utopian visions of a world in which everyone has a universal right to everything that Government can provide.  Allow me to quote the question and the Marxist answer that was developed out of necessity because their original premises were so wildly wrong and evil:

Why work?
 
In a challenging paper, Shapiro and Stiglitz (1984) argued that – despite imperfect monitoring – work incentives are preserved in Western economies because those caught shirking face the threat of unemployment and loss of income. The ‘No Shirking Condition’ they derive for wages constitutes the effective labour supply curve for the economy – with labour demand given by its marginal productivity. We apply the same broad logic to the Soviet system in CEPR DP 6621 – but with two significant alterations. First, in deriving the No Shirking Condition for labour supply, custodial sentences replace spells of unemployment-on-benefit as the ‘worker-discipline device’, so the supply price of labour falls not with the numbers of unemployed but with the population of the Gulag. Second, wages are set below the marginal productivity of labour as the dictator exercises monopsony power in the labour market to maximise investible funds.

… The state commands a goodly share of national resources, but wages are pushed down to ‘efficiency’ levels – just high enough to prevent shirking. No-one is unemployed, but many are in labour camps.
 
Ironically, the outcome for labour is as if it faced a greedy capitalist who wanted to maximise profits and had the market power to do so. More than that, the state employer can also manipulate the living and working conditions for those not in civilian employment to further its own ends. To increase investment, for example, prison conditions can be made harsher – so as to lower the supply price of civilian labour and reduce consumption. Where this may lead is what Solzhenitsyn (1963) describes – from first-hand experience – in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

You need to understand that everything Obama stands for is a system in which the rich are discouraged from working harder because they are not allowed – and do not deserve – to keep the fruits of what they risked more and worked harder to earn. 

So why work harder at all?  Why even work?  After all, if business owners didn’t build their businesses, who can truly be said to build anything?  Why bother to work to build anything at all?

The penultimate result of that kind of thinking is the Marxist solution.  You will work harder not because we will reward you for working harder – that contradicts our liberal philosophy that some deserve more than others.  No, you will work harder because the State requires that you work harder and you will work harder because otherwise we will put you in a gulag and MAKE you work harder.

That is the logical outcome of where Obama is heading.  History has already proven that time and again.

Let’s see what small business owner Jack Gilchrist says about Obama’s telling him he and his family didn’t build their business:

Tags: government, If you’ve got a business, Internet, Jack Gilchrist, man on the moon, NASA, public schools, Romney ad, Somebody else made that happen, you didn’t build that