"You didn't get there on your own"

[Bfgrn]

Krauthammer gets it.

To say that 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. …

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 created 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.

Did the state make you great? « Hot Air Headlines

Krauthammer doesn't 'get' it...he doesn't 'get' it at ALL.

He doesn't even 'get' what our founders created.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"

We the People ARE the government. Conservatives love to sever that seminal truth.

WHAT is America? Is it buildings, statues and concrete, or is it people? Liberals know the answer to that questions, do conservatives?

"Labor is the United States. The men and women, who with their minds, their hearts and hands, create the wealth that is shared in this country—they are America."
President Dwight D. Eisenhower

 

[saveliberty]

Consent of the governed has become a passive acceptance by a majority of citizens who now need entitlements.

 

[Oldstyle]

Krauthammer gets it.

To say that 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. …

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 created 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.

Did the state make you great? « Hot Air Headlines

Krauthammer doesn't 'get' it...he doesn't 'get' it at ALL.

He doesn't even 'get' what our founders created.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"

We the People ARE the government. Conservatives love to sever that seminal truth.

WHAT is America? Is it buildings, statues and concrete, or is it people? Liberals know the answer to that questions, do conservatives?

"Labor is the United States. The men and women, who with their minds, their hearts and hands, create the wealth that is shared in this country—they are America."
President Dwight D. Eisenhower

I'm sorry but Charles Krauthammer DOES get it. He understands that the true strength of America has always been that an individual had more rights than "society" and that the individual's rights to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness were protected from the government. THAT is what has always made America unique. That is what people like yourself and Barack Obama fail to "get".

 

[Listening]

Krauthammer gets it.

To say that 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. …

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 created 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.

Did the state make you great? « Hot Air Headlines

Krauthammer doesn't 'get' it...he doesn't 'get' it at ALL.

He doesn't even 'get' what our founders created.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"

We the People ARE the government. Conservatives love to sever that seminal truth.

WHAT is America? Is it buildings, statues and concrete, or is it people? Liberals know the answer to that questions, do conservatives?

"Labor is the United States. The men and women, who with their minds, their hearts and hands, create the wealth that is shared in this country—they are America."
President Dwight D. Eisenhower

The only question liberals know the answer to is where the welfare checks are handed out.

Why don't you quit being so self righteous and say something meaningful ?

Since we (conservatives) are part of the people, we are going to darn well fight to make sure that our part of the "consent" piece is recognized and when you try to govern us to much against our consent, you get what you have now.....a mess.

Obamacare cuts my HSA limit in half. Thanks for making my healthcare more expensive.

 

[Bfgrn]

Krauthammer gets it.


Did the state make you great? « Hot Air Headlines

Krauthammer doesn't 'get' it...he doesn't 'get' it at ALL.

He doesn't even 'get' what our founders created.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"

We the People ARE the government. Conservatives love to sever that seminal truth.

WHAT is America? Is it buildings, statues and concrete, or is it people? Liberals know the answer to that questions, do conservatives?

"Labor is the United States. The men and women, who with their minds, their hearts and hands, create the wealth that is shared in this country—they are America."
President Dwight D. Eisenhower

The only question liberals know the answer to is where the welfare checks are handed out.

Why don't you quit being so self righteous and say something meaningful ?

Since we (conservatives) are part of the people, we are going to darn well fight to make sure that our part of the "consent" piece is recognized and when you try to govern us to much against our consent, you get what you have now.....a mess.

Obamacare cuts my HSA limit in half. Thanks for making my healthcare more expensive.

Only liberals are on welfare? Talk about self righteous with a huge dose of obtuse.

It is so typical of conservatives to use welfare as an example, while they try to dismantle wonderful social programs like Social Security and Medicare. NO liberal supports lazy people collecting government checks. But liberals realize that is the minority, not the majority. And liberals also realize the half the humans in this country living in poverty are children. Are children expected to support themselves Listening?

But it is just another self centered justifications for creating an aristocracy, which is ALWAYS the aim of conservatism since man began walking upright. Here's your problem; your fairy tale requires other people to play along and conform to a role YOU supply for them.

EVERYTHING you post has the same earmarks; instead of learning and having facts create your view, you start with your far right wing view and ideology, then look for ammunition.

To try to CREATE social programs as the root cause is just another attempt to take your right wing social views and find any shed of evidence you can to blame liberals and protect the elite you worship.

The War on Poverty, what it is and isn't...

There's always the 'able bodied but lazy poor person', the 'bleeding heart liberal' who just wants to hand out other people's money and of course, the clear headed 'conservative' whose 'tough love' always saves the day. Well, I refuse to play along. Maybe you should gain the intelligence and curiosity to find out what the 'War on Poverty' was about and what it wasn't about. But it's a lot easier for you to define it under YOUR self righteous terms so you don't have to care. It is also predictable that you chose 'welfare', because that fits so neatly into your 'dependency' and 'entitlement' dismissal of others.

There are reasons for and realities to poverty, you have focused on the least of them.

When JFK's brother-in law Sargent Shriver accepted LBJ's challenge and took on the 'War on Poverty' the first thing he discovered was rather startling and disturbing. Half of the Americans living in poverty were children. Another large segment were elderly and another segment were mentally and/or physically disabled. So a HUGE segment of the poor fit the TRUE definition of a dependent. So there is an obligation as a civil society to make sure those real dependents are not trampled on or extinguished.

To address some of the players in your fairy tale, voila! We have an unabashed flaming liberal...Sargent Shriver. But I hate to disappoint you. Sargent Shriver hated welfare and had no intention of creating a handout program. He didn't believe in handouts, he believed in community action. The 'War on Poverty' was called the Office of Economic Opportunity. The core principles were opportunity, responsibility, community and empowerment. The program's aims were maximum feasible participation. One of the concepts of empowerment was poor people had a right to one-third of the seats on every local poverty program board. It was a community based program that focused on education as the keys to the city. Programs such as VISTA, Job Corps, Community Action Program, and Head Start were created to increase opportunity for the poor so they could pull themselves out of poverty with a hand UP, not a hand out. Even when Johnson effectively pulled the plug on the War on Poverty to fund the war in Vietnam, Shriver fought on and won. During the Shriver years more Americans got out of poverty than during any similar time in our history. (The Clinton years - employing the same philosophy - were the second best.)Ref

 

[blastoff]

I'm sure all the BUSINESS people in the country LOVE hearing this shit from Obama

UnFrikenbelievable

please vote this Progressive idiot out

Barack Hussein Forrest Obama...as in, stupid is as stupid does.

 

[OohPooPahDoo]

.
Obama is taking an interesting and dangerous approach on the campaign trail, telling successful business owners that they "didn't get there on their own", that their success is predicated in part on the labor and efforts (and taxes) of others.
.

I applaud you for not just quoting out of context. Your statement I believe accurate reflects what Obama meant.

And frankly, its true. I know that Republicans may feel in their hearts that business success - particularly their own - is 100% due to their efforts, but the facts and the evidence tell us otherwise. Everywhere you look, you'll see the influence of the greatest public-private partnership in all of history - the scientific and technological complex, a web of public and private entities, some motivated by quest for profit, others by quest for knowledge, still others by quest of national defense - all leading to best economy in the world.

Public v. Private is simply not that simple, in other words.

If all of science was funded by the public, there would be a lot more advances in general scientific theories but no concentration on the kind that would benefit the economy. Obviously business would suffer dearly.

If all of science is funded by the private, we'll do fine for a while but over several decades, we'll fall way behind in science, and the technology will eventually suffer. Most private enterprise simply has no interest in funding science whose benefits may not be realized for decades upon decades to come. Einstein's relativity would have never come about had there only been private funding of science - yet his theory is now crucial to the functioning of something most of us even take for granted now - GPS.

 

[CrusaderFrank]

Krauthammer gets it.

To say that 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. …

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 created 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.

Did the state make you great? « Hot Air Headlines

Krauthammer doesn't 'get' it...he doesn't 'get' it at ALL.

He doesn't even 'get' what our founders created.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"

We the People ARE the government. Conservatives love to sever that seminal truth.

WHAT is America? Is it buildings, statues and concrete, or is it people? Liberals know the answer to that questions, do conservatives?

"Labor is the United States. The men and women, who with their minds, their hearts and hands, create the wealth that is shared in this country—they are America."
President Dwight D. Eisenhower

Neo Marxists quoting our Founders. How cute!

They didn't build the country on their own right? The British did that!

 

[CrusaderFrank]

.
Obama is taking an interesting and dangerous approach on the campaign trail, telling successful business owners that they "didn't get there on their own", that their success is predicated in part on the labor and efforts (and taxes) of others.
.

I applaud you for not just quoting out of context. Your statement I believe accurate reflects what Obama meant.

And frankly, its true. I know that Republicans may feel in their hearts that business success - particularly their own - is 100% due to their efforts, but the facts and the evidence tell us otherwise. Everywhere you look, you'll see the influence of the greatest public-private partnership in all of history - the scientific and technological complex, a web of public and private entities, some motivated by quest for profit, others by quest for knowledge, still others by quest of national defense - all leading to best economy in the world.

Public v. Private is simply not that simple, in other words.

If all of science was funded by the public, there would be a lot more advances in general scientific theories but no concentration on the kind that would benefit the economy. Obviously business would suffer dearly.

If all of science is funded by the private, we'll do fine for a while but over several decades, we'll fall way being in science, and the technology will eventually suffer. Most private enterprise simply has no interest in funding science whose benefits may not be realized for decades upon decades to come. Einstein's relativity would have never come about had there only been private funding of science - yet his theory is now crucial to the functioning of something most of us even take for granted now - GPS.

What Obama meant was that he's finally out of his Marxist closet and lovingly embraces his Inner Mao

 

[Murf76]

the government doesn't pay for anything! Taxpayers do!

Fox did a poll in the 2008 election cycle and found that 24% didn't know that the government doesn't have its own money. That's one in four.

Scary thought, huh?

 

[Dick Tuck]

As to the OP, his comments brought about a good discussion. How do those who make it, leverage on public money to get to where they get?

 

[Murf76]

I think its gonna turn around and bite him in the ass.

Try telling a business owner that he didn't pour his heart, soul, capital, time and effort into his business. Tell him he didn't make sacrifices to keep his dream alive. Tell him someone else did it for him. Tell him he owes it all to someone else.

Yeah. That oughta go over big with business owners especially coming from a guy who's never held a real job in his entire life.

Jesus. Obamas a schmuck.

The fact is, most businesses couldn't survive without government. It's just most of them are too arrogant to admit it.

Your store couldn't exist without government run utilities, government provided protection, and government provided roads so goods and customers could get to it. Nor would you be able to educate employees to the level of competence if the government hadn't taught them how to do math and read first.

Conservatives used to be for more efficient, more lean government. Now government has become the enemy... and that's just kind of sad.

Not true. There was commerce in this country waaaayyy before any sort of organized effort at government. Government come in response to commerce, not the other way around. Settlers go in first, commence to trading with one another and maybe whatever indigenous people are to be found, and then they develop laws to manage their security and taxes to enforce those laws.

 

[chanel]

Die hard conservatives AND liberals who worship him have known all along that he was anti-capitalism. It's the people in the middle that are finally catching on.

"Successful people" regardless of wealth, understand that the govt had little or nothing to do with their success. Julia is a cartoon character.

Big mistake IMHO.

 

[Vidi]

Krauthammer gets it.

To say that 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. …

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 created 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.

Did the state make you great? « Hot Air Headlines

No Krauthammer doesn't get it.

Our government is of, for and by the people. That makes it the personification of our society. You can seperate society from a monarch, or a communist committee, or a dictator, but in a democracy, they are one in the same. THAT'S what made America so different at its founding. WE are the government.

Einstein didn't PROVE relativity. That was Swarzchild and Eddington.In other words, he didn't do it alone.

And Steve Jobs IS the perfect example because he keeps being credited with building the Mac. Steve Jobs didn't build the Mac! That was Steve Wozniak. Jobs was a salesman. And he sold The Wozs invention.

And every time that little fact is ignored to make the "individual" argument, it not further proves that it's a lie.

 

[BlindBoo]

Wow, the GOP echo chamber got alot of you to believe a ficticous narrative from a single sentance taken out of context.

Again.

Why am I not supprised.

 

[Listening]

Krauthammer gets it.

To say that 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. …

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 created 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.

Did the state make you great? « Hot Air Headlines

No Krauthammer doesn't get it.

Our government is of, for and by the people. That makes it the personification of our society. You can seperate society from a monarch, or a communist committee, or a dictator, but in a democracy, they are one in the same. THAT'S what made America so different at its founding. WE are the government.

And Steve Jobs IS the perfect example because he keeps being credited with building the Mac. Steve Jobs didn't build the Mac! That was Steve Wozniak. Jobs was a salesman. And he sold The Wozs invention.

And every time that little fact is ignored to make the "individual" argument, it not further proves that it's a lie.

Can you reword this so it makes some sense ?

Krauthammer has a point of view that is shared by many of us. There is no getting it or not getting it.

But I can tell you that government is not the personification of our society. That is a really stupid statement.

 

[Murf76]

Everyone of you right-wing idiots are total morons. You deliberately took Obama's statements out of context and changed the entire meaning of what he was saying. He did not say what you say he said. You're bunch of fuckin' liars and I see no reason why anyone would vote for your kind of bullshit!

Obama was talking about the roads and bridges businesses use to transport their products to market. Those businesses did not build the roads and bridges. We did. The American taxpayer built those roads and bridges and made it possible for businesses to flourish.

I swear to God, you people are as dumb as it gets.

There was literally NO WAY to take Obama's comments out of context. Think about it for a minute... the reason he made the speech that he did was to justify his larger argument about raising taxes. Why he thinks it's okay to ask more of the business community IS the context.

The guy said what he meant. And he did it in such a way as to make it impossible to take it any other way. Just because you see his speech reduced to one sentence, doesn't mean that the one sentence you see isn't actually representative of the whole.

 

[Foxfyre]

This has actually been a fascinating discussion to watch. Once you back out the professional, probably paid trolls and are left with those who actually have mostly their own opinions, those on the right seem to understand without exception how Obama's point of view on this is counter to everything the Founders intended for this country and counter to everything we know and have experienced in building and running businesses that are the economic lifeblood of the country.

Perhaps there are one or two on the left who also understand that, but most are straining at unimaginable gnats to change what he said into something more palatable, or are refusing to believe he said it at all.

Those of us who wanted Obama to be more than just another clueless Marxist knew in our hearts what he was and hoped he wasn't. From his "spread the wealth around" in the Joe the Plumber incident to so many other little clues, he has let us into his inner thoughts and motives. But letting us know how he really views those who take the risks to build the economy and provide resources and income for all is the icing on that cake. The man is a Marxist and that should be so crystal clear now beyond all question.

 

[Vidi]

Krauthammer gets it.


Did the state make you great? « Hot Air Headlines

No Krauthammer doesn't get it.

Our government is of, for and by the people. That makes it the personification of our society. You can seperate society from a monarch, or a communist committee, or a dictator, but in a democracy, they are one in the same. THAT'S what made America so different at its founding. WE are the government.

And Steve Jobs IS the perfect example because he keeps being credited with building the Mac. Steve Jobs didn't build the Mac! That was Steve Wozniak. Jobs was a salesman. And he sold The Wozs invention.

And every time that little fact is ignored to make the "individual" argument, it not further proves that it's a lie.

Can you reword this so it makes some sense ?

Krauthammer has a point of view that is shared by many of us. There is no getting it or not getting it.

But I can tell you that government is not the personification of our society. That is a really stupid statement.

So you don't believe in We the people?

 

[Meister]

No business owner built the roads and bridges by themselves.


Lying to the American people and altering quotes wont win you any elections

Why did they need roads and bridges?
It comes down to which came first, businesses or roads and highways?
Why would you need a highway or roads if not for businesses which employ people who live in towns that grow into cities?