Obama: ‘None of us make it on our own’

posted at 10:42 am on October 12, 2011 by Howard Portnoy
[ Elections ]   

Matt Drudge has a fascinating pair of “before” and “after” photos, both of fund-raising events for candidate Obama. The first picture is from 2008 and shows a vast amphitheater filled to the rafters with enthusiastic supporters. The second is from Tuesday. It shows a much smaller auditorium with more empty seats than filled ones.

As the sun sets on his presidency, candidate Obama continues to hammer away at the same stale message about economic fairness and shared sacrifice to anyone who will listen. If only the wealthiest Americans, he laments, would open up their hearts and—more importantly—their pocketbooks, all would be well. Our looming $14 trillion national debt would be erased.

Sometimes the president adds a logical flight of fancy to his argument, on one occasion for example calling upon the rich to dip into the “additional income” that they “don’t need.” Last night in Orlando he channeled a former member of his own administration, Elizabeth Warren, who said during an unsuccessful run for a seat in the U.S. Senate, “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own.”

Obama’s version was less grammatically well turned—he said, “None of us make [sic] it on our own”—but the argument was the same, which is to say equally flawed:

Somebody—an outstanding entrepreneur like a Steve Jobs—somewhere along the line he had a teacher who helped inspire him. All those great Internet businesses wouldn’t have succeeded unless somebody had invested in the government research that helped to create the Internet. We don’t succeed on our own. We succeed because this country has, in previous generations, made investments that allow all of us to succeed.

Obama is engaging in some chicken-and-egg reasoning here. It is true that teachers can be inspirational but only to students with the raw talent or intellect to become a Steve Jobs or a Thomas Edison. And even in the most compelling cases, a teacher is seldom little more than a conduit through which a gifted mind passes and becomes refined.

But more importantly, the assumption that teachers are perforce government employees is flat-out wrong. Using taxpayer money to finance education is a sufficient condition to educating the nation’s youth, but it is not a necessary one. Steve Jobs, given his druthers, sent his own daughter to a private school, which he praised as “the best school I’ve seen in my life.” There is no reason to assume that all “free” education in the country could not be run as well or better than the public sector by the private sector.

Obama’s Internet argument fails for similar reasons. It is easy to turn his claim about “government research that helped to create the Internet” on its head and say that without Lawrence Roberts, the man credited with designing the fundamental architecture underlying the ARPANET, there would be no Internet. There is also again no compelling reason to assume that the technology behind the Internet wouldn’t and couldn’t have been invented purely independently of the government.

Related Articles

• Obama’s latest gaffe: We’re the country that built the Intercontinental Railroad
• Elizabeth Warren: ‘There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own’
• Obama’s economic “fairness doctrine”
• Obama and the meaning of shared sacrifice
• Jay Carney claims unemployment checks create jobs
• Will president read message from man who jumped White House fence? (Video)
• Solution to the debt crisis: Tap the nation’s “additional income” reserve
• The “Empathy Clause” of the U.S. Constitution

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