The Tyranny of Columbia Suckled Professor Barack Hussein Obama, the Marxist

Krauthammer’s Epic Takedown of Obama’s Anti-Business Speech

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLSEFQ9Vxzc

 

  

“You didn’t build that”: A footnote

by Scott Johnson

 

 

 

This past Friday night at a campaign stop in Roanoke President Obama stated his teaching in a form that echoes Elizabeth Warren. Video of Obama’s speech is accessible here; video of the Elizabeth Warren original is accessible here.

 

Obama appeared to be speaking from the heart when he made his now famous remarks. They seem to provide a true insight into his deepest beliefs. Obama said:

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.

Obama continued:

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.

Everyone and his brother have commented on these remarks. The remarks are striking. Attention must be paid. I had my say in “The Obamaian persuasion in American politics.” Charles Krauthammer glossed them orally on the Fox News Special Report in what NRO declared an epic takedown. Rich Lowry devoted a column to them, as did James Antle at the Spectator and Michael Barone at the Examiner. Yesterday both John Sununu and Mitt Romney weighed in with perceptive comments of their own.

 

And yet, and yet. To borrow from Lincoln, “we have not yet reached the whole.” Not that anything said so far has erred, either in the significance or purport of Obama’s remarks, but we have not yet done them full justice.

 

Obama’s remarks support his demand for higher income taxes. Making his case, Obama seeks to undermine the claim of right with which individuals hold their property, their income, their wealth. Under Obama’s doctrine, all arise from the collective support of the government. They are not the fruit of the individual’s labor.

 

Under Obama’s doctrine, there is no just limit on the power of the government to take the individual’s property. The property isn’t that man’s alone; he alone did not earn it. What the government does not take from the individual by taxes or regulation remains his conditionally, on the sufferance of the state.

 

No teaching could be more foreign to the founding principles of the United States than Obama’s doctrine. To take one example, Madison’s famous Federalist Number 10, for example, speaks of the “diversity in the faculties of man, from which the rights of property originate.”

The protection of these faculties [that is, securing the right to liberty, including the right to keep the fruits of one’s honest industry] is the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results.

The right of property is referred to over and over again in the words of the founders as directed to the fruit of one’s labor. Thus Jefferson in his First Inaugural Address enjoins the government to restrain men from injuring one another but also to “leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement” and not “take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.”

And Lincoln applied the principles of the founders to the question of slavery. Referring to the arguments circulating in support of the supposed justice of slavery, Lincoln held:

They are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden. That is their argument, and this argument of the Judge [i.e., Stephen Douglas] is the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent …

“[I]t is all the same old serpent[.]” As we say here annually on Independence Day, thank you, Mr. Lincoln.

 

NOTE: My comments here follow chapter 2 of Thomas West’s invaluable Vindicating the Founders: Race, Sex, Class, and Justice in the Origins of America. Professor West compiles a few of the documents quoted in chapter 2 here.

 

UPDATE: Unlike John Sununu, I stand by Sununu’s comments on Obama’s remarks.

(Article sent by Lisa Rich, our Prager friends observor in California.)

Jimmy Carter – Barack Obama Join to Screw U.S. Taxpayer….the 51% who pay Federal Income tax

Sierra Club Sues to Stop Offshore Drilling,

and Guess Who Is Funding the Defense

from PJ Tatler  at Pajamas Media…..article sent by Brian Ross: 

Shell Oil wants to drill exploratory wells off the Alaska coast in the Beaufort and Chuckchi seas. The area in which Shell wants to drill may turn out to be America’s largest offshore oil find in decades. The company paid the US government over $2 billion in 2005 and 2008 for rights to drill off the outer-continental shelf, and spent the ensuing years clearing regulatory hurdle after regulatory hurdle.

But just as Shell prepares to sink its first wells this month, along comes the big green job killing machine. The Sierra Club is leading a consortium of environmental groups that has mounted a last-second lawsuit aimed at stopping the wells. The lawsuit seeks to undo the permits for future drilling seasons by challenging the government’s oil spill recovery plans. The groups do not name Shell Oil in the suit, and that is by design. More on that in a moment.

Shell has a long record of safe and sound deepwater drilling. Alaskans want Shell to be able to drill, because it will create jobs for the state’s economy. If the find is as large as experts believe, it could rival the remaining reserves in the Gulf of Mexico. The Shell drilling could create 55,000 jobs for Alaska, while enhancing America’s energy security and independence.

Here’s another kicker. The offshore drilling that Shell is proposing will also inform how future development of the area might proceed. Shell is working with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration to study the ocean, coastal areas and climate in the Arctic. According to the NOAA pres release, “In 2011, Shell, Statoil, and ConocoPhillips signed a Memorandum of Understanding with NOAA to share high-quality data to enhance private-public sector collaboration. NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco said ‘This innovative partnership will expand NOAA’s access to important data, enhance our understanding of the region and improve the United States’ ability to manage critical environmental issues.’”

But the biggest kicker of all is who is ultimately paying for the lawsuit. Sierra Club’s group filed the lawsuit not against Shell, which has deep pockets and would be expected to defend itself vigorously in court, but against the US Department of the Interior. A little known US law called the Equal Access to Justice Act, signed by President Jimmy Carter in 1980, allows the groups to use lawsuits against government as revenue sources. When they sue, the government has to incur the costs of defending itself against the lawsuits, and also picks up the expenses for the groups suing the government. No one even keeps track of how much money the government has ended up spending on such lawsuits.

PJTV teamed up with the Washington Examiner in September 2010 to look at how Big Green games the system, costs the US taxpayer billions and kills jobs while keeping energy prices artificially high. We looked at where groups like Sierra get their money. They get much of it from taxpayers.

Krauthammer: Obama, who “never created or ran so much as a candy store” Speaketh Against Business Achievement

Krauthammer Rips Obama’s Speech Attacking Business: “Spoken By A Man Who Never Created Or Ran So Much As A Candy Store”

at realclearpolitics video:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/07/16/krauthammer_on_obamas_speech_attacking_business_spoken_by_a_man_who_never_created_or_ran_so_much_as_a_candy_store.html

“Spoken by a man who never created or ran so much as a candy store,” syndicated columnist and FOX News contributor Charles Krauthammer said in response to President Obama criticizing individual achievements in business this weekend. “And it’s completely a straw man argument as if conservatives and Republicans are arguing to disband the fire department and the police department so we could all individually do it on our own. The idea that infrastructure is necessary and good is as old as the republic. It’s older than that. The Romans had the Via Appia, and that wasn’t exactly a new idea. And they had sewers as well. The question is what are you doing with the money when you build the infrastructure?”

“You heard Obama talking about the moonshot. This was not on that clip, but in that speech. He went through a list of the great achievements that the government has done, the moonshot. Well, Obama is the guy who shut down the moon program, the manned space program so that today we have to outsource our access into space for any American astronaut who wants to go to the space station we have to pay the Russians $50 million a shot,” Krauthammer said on the “Special Report” panel tonight.

“He spoke about the invention of the internet, which he neglected to say was the work of Al Gore. In fact, it wasn’t the government that invented, when in general it was the defense department, a part of the government. And what’s Obama done as he’s sprinkled billions of dollars in all of the other departments in government? He’s shrunk the defense department. It’s now looking at draconian cuts. This is a man who spent a trillion dollars and left not a residue. He could have, for example, done something about the electric grid. He did nothing on that. Instead, he sprinkled the money on cronies on pie in the sky ideological fetishes like solar panels and electric cars. Which is the future, but it ain’t here and it’s not going to happen. Money that is wasted, it is water on the sand. He did not leave behind a residue of all that and yet he speaks about infrastructure. All of us want to do infrastructure, but real infrastructure, and then leave the rest of life to the private individual and the entrepreneur,” Krauthammer said.

“You’re fired up about this one?” host Bret Baier asked Krauthammer.

“Occasionally, occasionally Obama gets me somewhat revved. He did it on the weekend. I now have the rest of the week to recover,” Krauthammer said.