(no subject)

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

I'd been ignoring the thing going around the past week or so about Obama's silly statement. But then I saw an excerpt from Atlas Shrugged (which I've never read, btw) which countered it perfectly. And since no one else seems to have posted on the topic, one way or the other, I guess it's time to cover it.



See the above link for a longer excerpt and a video, but the bit that's being passed around is: If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.

And the excerpt from Atlas Shrugged is:

“He didn't invent iron ore and blast furnaces, did he?”

“Who?”

“Rearden. He didn't invent smelting and chemistry and air compression. He couldn't have invented his Metal but for thousands and thousands of other people. His Metal! Why does he think it's his? Why does he think it's his invention? Everybody uses the work of everybody else. Nobody ever invents anything.”

She said, puzzled, “But the iron ore and all those other things were there all the time. Why didn't anybody else make that Metal, but Mr. Rearden did?”

You should be able to see that the problem isn't the surface sentiment. Obviously we aren't all doing everything alone. That's the point of having a society after all. The problem is Obama's underlying assumption that because what person X does was based on work done by others or uses things provided by others therefore the output of person X is not his. This is fundamentally anti-capitalist and anti-American. I would consider it socialist, others might not, that's not really relevant. This is the major problem with Obama specifically and Progressives in general.

In looking around for a good source for the actual speech rather than just responses to it, I found an interesting little article which I think covers the problem with Obama's speech pretty well.

Comments

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Oh, great, now we're citing wretched author tracts instead of science fiction. I suppose if an admirer of serial killers educated in the Soviet Union who happened to have a rape fetish is now a guide to life, the universe, and everything I can respond to this with my favorite equally fictional response to such concepts:

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves Orcs.”

[fornikate.livejournal.com]

ahahahahaha

[curseangel.livejournal.com]

I love that quote so much.

[root-fu.livejournal.com]

Oh, lawd. Anti Ayn Rand elitists. How trendy can you get? :T

[kayjayuu.livejournal.com]

Well, from what I've read and actually hearing in the actual speech, that bit was taken out of context.

While I agree with your sentiment completely, it's not really relevant to the snippet in question, since it answers the wrong supposition. IMO.

[nevermind6794.livejournal.com]

The problem is Obama's underlying assumption that because what person X does was based on work done by others or uses things provided by others therefore the output of person X is not his.

That's not the assumption, it's that the output of person X is not his alone.

I read the first page of that article, and it was pretty patently silly. It ignores things like infrastructure being underfunded, Medicare and Social Security being services at the individual level, etc.

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

Same thing. If it's not his alone then it's not his.

[enders-shadow.livejournal.com]

The internet was not there "all the time"
Nor were dozens of other things.

New inventions yield new inventions.

Somebody had to invent the wheel that the truck that brings your supplies use.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

Yes but if we practiced the top-down centralized control that progressives have such a fetish for it'd still look like AOL 3.0 and pretty much all the stuff that makes it what we know and love would still be in the realm of speculation.

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

I think it's funny that your allegedly 'interesting little article' had an ad for a 'free energy device'. Tesla!

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

I consider myself a member of their target audience and even I find PJmedia silly on most occasions.

[chron-job.livejournal.com]

> The problem is Obama's underlying assumption that because what person X does was based on work done by others or uses things provided by others therefore the output of person X is not his.

Do you believe all taxes are theft? Do you believe that all mandatory taxes are inherently wrong? If TRUE goto 10. If FALSE goto 20.

10: You are radically out of step with the sentiment of your countrymen. you might best be served by moving to Somalia.

END

20: SOME of the output of person X IS his. SOME of it is not. Unless you picked 10 above, we AGREE ON THIS. Unless you're that Zealot, we BOTH demand some portion of his output to maintain the society that allows him to continue output-ing. the argument is not whether taxes should exist, but on degrees and limits. How much, and who, and for what.


Newton said something very close to Obama's point. "If I have seen further it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants."

Newton acknowledged his intellectual debt to others who shared in his work. Taxes acknowledge our worldly debt to others who share the duties of citizenship.

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

You have a screwy understanding of taxes.

[devil-ad-vocate.livejournal.com]

“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.”

I fail to see how that is a "silly statement".

[curseangel.livejournal.com]

Srsly.

I saw someone on Tumblr or something, an article with some guy asserting that his two daughters (ages seven and four) built their ~lemonade stand empire~ all on their own with no help from the government or ANYBODY. I almost loled myself to death.

[curseangel.livejournal.com]

There's nothing "anti-capitalist" or "anti-American" or even socialist about acknowledging that nobody makes anything by themselves, and, as someone else already mentioned, that their output is not theirs ALONE. It isn't. Even if you invent something, countless others have had their hands in its making, in creating processes, in forming elements, in contributing ideas, in building the factory to produce your invention, in working to produce it in those factories, in creating and building planes, trains, trucks, roads, railways, etc. to transport and ship your invention, in building and creating and staffing and working in stores to sell your invention, and on and on and on. Many of those things are created by the government or with government funding, and almost all are contributed to or done by people who make a pittance for their time and labor (the underclass and lower-class). (ETA: Oh yeah, and let's not forget the government-funded schools the inventor was educated in, the teachers who educated them, the societal structure that enabled them to succeed, etc. etc.)

Ergo, the inventor still owes all of those people, especially the underclass and lower-class, because without them he would have nothing. Without government and government funding and a capitalist social structure that is inherently, fundamentally unequal and privileges certain people (like the inventor) vastly above most others, that inventor would have less than nothing and wouldn't be an inventor in the first place.

And that is why taxes.

[notmrgarrison.livejournal.com]

I'm going to out on a limb and say that inventions predate government. I'd agree without any government things would completely suck, but I would say if anything it is the underclass who would have nothing if not for the inventors, not the other way around.

[root-fu.livejournal.com]

What Obama said is extremely socialist in tone & disempowering to individuals.

Its similar to Mikhail Kalashnikov inventing the AK-47 & receiving zero credit for his invention. "You didn't invent the AK-47 Mikhail, the credit falls to others..." The state seizes everything, contributions of individuals are not recognized nor acknowledged. The state doesn't tolerate heroes nor individuals to be elevated above the ranks of common workers who serve it.

[notmrgarrison.livejournal.com]

Jonathan! Jonathan!

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

If you can't acknowledge that people are fundamentally connected and we survive in this little thing called civilization through cooperation then I don't know what to tell you. This kind of attitude is exactly what fosters the 'fuck you, got mine' manta.

[notmrgarrison.livejournal.com]

OP: "Obviously we aren't all doing everything alone. "

[merig00.livejournal.com]

Meh... Obama tried to channel Elizabeth Warren and even failed at that.

People should stop reading Ayn Rand and pick up soviet writers of 1920-1960s. Too bad I can't quiet Sholokhov's Harvest on the Don. Chapter 4 perfectly describes all this bs.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

And here we go with the egregious misuses of genocide that killed in the ranges of millions to tens of millions for cheap political points. Dancing over mass graves is evidently all well and good so long as they happened under Communists.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

Small business owners are usually in the hock to several investors anyways. I, for one, do not participate in the culture of adoration surrounding "small business owners". They're usually terribly annoying and not very smart. They fail 9 times out of 10 and generally act like they know what they're doing, but mostly they're just stumbling their way through it. Being a capitalist, I find the desire to coddle, adore and praise every Tom, Dick and Harry with a sign and a shingle to be repugnant. This isn't a meritocracy, this is a sycophantic, juvenile popularity contest.

[merig00.livejournal.com]

So basically you are saying "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."

[sealwhiskers.livejournal.com]

God, this type of post for the umptienth time will make me go and vote for the socialist party in Sweden for the first time in my life.
I'm gonna go ahead and do it!! Thank you t_p, you've made me a real socialist!!

(I admit, I was a Green party/centrist for most of my votes, but now it's all PINKO!!)

[kayjayuu.livejournal.com]

Plenty of posts from the other viewpoint that make me want to do the opposite. This comm tries to attract all views, I was lead to believe.

[merig00.livejournal.com]

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Proof that women can be just as stuffy as men.

[oslo.livejournal.com]

See the above link for a longer excerpt and a video,

We call this "context."

but the [excerpt most susceptible to spin] that's being passed around is: "If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen."

FTFY.

And the excerpt from Atlas Shrugged is:

Nice. You only need one sentence from Obama, but Rand gets a whole dialogue.

You should be able to see that the problem isn't the surface sentiment. ... The problem is Obama's underlying assumption that because what person X does was based on work done by others or uses things provided by others therefore the output of person X is not his.

But Obama at no point says this. What he's criticizing is the mythical hyper-individualism that underlies many conservative positions. He's not building the argument (and Warren wasn't building to this point, either) that the government should just be entitled to take as much as it wants from individuals. He's saying that the conservative outlook, which posits that the government should take as little as possible because taking anything already infringes upon individual dignity (or whatever), is built upon a faulty premise.

What's interesting - and you really ought to read Atlas Shrugged before you quote it out of context, as well - is that Rand provides her own support for Obama's point. Because it's in an important sense true that Rearden's success is wholly dependent upon others. And not just upon scientists that preceded him, but also upon the factory workers that make the production of his steel possible.

Now, in Rand's universe, these are all noble peasants; they negotiate their wages with manly virtue and they are committed to (and recognize) Rearden's demi-god-like status. But what's important to recognize is that they're not just in it for the job and the paycheck; they're in it because they're committed to a cooperative enterprise. They're not just in it for themselves; they're in it for something greater than themselves. The fact that they do good work for Rearden means something significant to them. The same is roughly true of Rand-Heaven, a.k.a. "Galt's Gulch."

Rand distinguishes between these noble peasants and her favorite villains, who are defined by their desire to expropriate achievements without exercising effort or earning merit. But that doesn't mean that Rand provides any meaningful counterpoint to Obama, who isn't trying to draw our attention to why we should tear down our giants so much as he's arguing how we help those giants become who they are. Compare this to dominant Republican myth-making - where workers are nothing but expenses, infrastructure spending a necessary evil, etc. Maybe neither Obama nor Romney paints a truly accurate picture of our real-life "John Galts," how they come about, or what we can do to help them succeed, but surely Obama's picture recognizes an important aspect of their success that Romney would never acknowledge.

[kayjayuu.livejournal.com]

What he's criticizing is the mythical hyper-individualism that underlies many conservative positions.

I'd posit that's in response to the hyper-collectivism that peppers so many ideological discussions, such as curseangels. "The rich owe EVERYTHING to the underclass!" "But, wait, I didn't mean it literally, not EVERYTHING. But EVERYTHING." One extreme position begets another, begets another, etc.

Myths have an origin. Repeat a myth often enough, etc. etc. Wouldn't it be nice if everyone were reasonable and not prone to whargarbl?

[telemann.livejournal.com]

[kayjayuu.livejournal.com]

Does Jon Stewart take any deductions on his taxes? I wonder.

[eracerhead.livejournal.com]

Wow I read the headlines and then the text. Apparently conservatives have difficulty with reading comprehension.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

They gotta try something. The media is having a field day with Romney's lack of tax publicity. I personally don't care after being disillusioned with the birth certificate nonsense, but it's apparently gaining traction.

[rimpala.livejournal.com]

Wait we're arguing over Ayn Rand?

[telemann.livejournal.com]

No, I think she's universally considered a hack, maybe one step above the Twilight books. But not by much :P

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

I have to say that Obama has a good point there. The people with the greatest incomes in any business organization are usually the people who created the smallest quantity of the organization's wealth. I have worked at firms where top management personnel regularly made mistakes that had to be corrected by lower level managers. If those errors had not been corrected, the business would have gone under. Of course, that is not what Obama was talking about, but it is pertinent.

[404.livejournal.com]

The issue with the president's statement is that he tries to collectivize individual's work into society/the government, saying that because there is a government and a relatively stable society, that is the reason why you are successful in starting your business/ the invention you developed/ etc. While having a national government that is strong enough to create a stable society is helpful, it's not imperative to have.

[nevermind6794.livejournal.com]

No, he simply puts the individual's work in context, which is in direct response to the popular "job creator" arguments.. Someone wrote a computer program and made millions of dollars, that's great - but that almost certainly couldn't have happened without governmental support for electrification, the Internet, the integrated circuit, the safety net that allowed people to take risks without starving, schools, scientific research, etc.

I think a better way to phrase the point is that government played a necessary role - not that it did all the work, mind you - in laying the foundation on which individuals can build, and flourish. And to maintain and improve on that foundation, so that people who come after us can put their talents to work, people have to accept the magnitude of the public sector's role - and the associated taxes - in all that.

We can argue all day long about the success and failure of specific programs to achieve that goal, but first we have to get people to accept the idea that government spending has historically been critical to what the U.S. is today, and I think that's what Obama's trying to do.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

that because what person X does was based on work done by others or uses things provided by others therefore the output of person X is not his

No, not the whole output.

[spaz-own-joo.livejournal.com]

"The problem is Obama's underlying assumption that because what person X does was based on work done by others or uses things provided by others therefore the output of person X is not his.

And can you justify the opposite assumption, that even though the work person X does was based on work done by others or uses things provided by others, the output of person X is his?

Once you've justified that assumption, can you explain why this doesn't mean that factory workers, and not factory owners, should be entitled to keep and sell the factory's product?

[merig00.livejournal.com]

I'm not going to go into the whole issue of innovation/risk taking vs replication, I'll just ask you to explain to me if factory workers entitled to keep and sell the factory's product what is keeping union of auto workers from saying, "Fuck you capitalist pigs of GM and Ford! We are the one who are making cars and profit for you. We know better how to build cars." Get up and go build their own assembly plant with their own car production? Why that almost never happens?

Almost because some individuals workers do exactly that and become well the same small business owners and employ people in the same manner.