“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 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 conceived and built 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 gravesite.
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.
Charles Krauthammer is a columnist for The Washington Post. Readers may contact him at letters@charleskrauthammer.com.
I want to see Charles Krauthammer and Obama on live tv in primetime and watch the destruction of Obama in front of his fans. Krauthammer has nailed this one….no surprise there.
In that situation, Krathammer would make a fool of himself as he almost always does – but it wouldn’t matter, because his fans would still cheer him on as though every bit of nonsense that came out of his mouth were bits of brilliant wisdom.
“Krauthammer has nailed this one….no surprise there.”
Krauthammer fails to even get the context of the quote – the “that” Obama referred to was infrastructure, not the business itself, as the selective edit implies. But, even out-of-context, Krauthammer misses the point – without a government that creates stability no trade can occur. There are no private property rights in a war zone, for example.
excellent. My business is still open despite our government, not because of it.
So you are saying your business would function better without any government?
Krauthammer completely misses the point here (something he seems to have great talent for). Obama made an accurate, insightful observation about the fundamental folly of libertarian individualism. Krauthammer, on the other hand, just mocks liberalism, socialism, collectivism, etc. without ever offering any evidence to disprove the President’s statement.
You forgot communism and marxism.
What a ridiculous column. If one views the context of the speech, it is obvious that Pres. Obama was referring to complementary infrastructure that businesses did not build (they are built by all of us through our tax dollars).
The president was inarticulate, but he was NOT implying that business owners didn’t build their own enterprises. He was trying to impress upon his audience that, at a certain level, we’re all in this together. (Does anyone really believe that trucking companies, for example, would even HAVE a business without our nasty, collectivist and socialistic highway system?)
This is a perfect example of the necessity of each of us to practice criticism of sources. Whether it be MSNBC, Fox, or NPR, prejudice in reporting is always present.
How about the people who are succesful
by just working and don’t have a business.
They must have all been helped by the govt
too.
They drive, don’t they? Their business is protected by emergency services, isn’t it? Yeah, even the guy working for himself did get help from the government – he got a stable environment in which to do business.