Liberals are burbling in delight over Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren’s full-throated expression of the left’s soak-the-rich version of the social contract.
Warren said:
I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever. No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody.”
“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.
“Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.â€
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One of Glen Reynolds’ readers, who signs himself Fog City sent along his own rejoinder to Warren, originally posted in a discussion of her remarks in the Current Events section of a Stanford Football Fan forum:
“You built a factory out there? Good for you,†“Built a factory†is a summary for a lot of work. Put up equity, designed a business, took risk to buy land, get permits, pay property taxes and use taxes and permit fees. Then, bought a bunch of equipment and had it installed …and paid sales taxes. Hired some employees and paid them a bunch of money and paid payroll taxes on top of that. Bought a bunch of raw materials from companies that paid a bunch of salaries and a bunch of taxes. Building a factory is a huge private investment that pays the public a lot of taxes for the right to be built.
“But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for.†Between fuel taxes, license fees, tolls and various taxes on transportation related activities, the roads budget is smaller than the total tax take.
you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; No, you did not educate them. You babysat them for 12 years. Then I hired them, taught them how to be responsible and show up for work, taught them how to communicate in clear sentences, taught them that there are rights and wrongs and (unlike with your schools) wrongs have consequences in the workplace. Then paid for extended education for my employees so they could continue to improve themselves and better add value to what we do around here.
“You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.†Funny, my factory has 24/7 security guards because the last time it was broken into, the police did not even bother to take a report, they just said “call your insurance companyâ€. As for fire? The closest fire department is 10 miles away. My insurance company requires that I have a full wet sprinkler system to qualify for insurance because there is no local fire protection.
“You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.†Well, that is not exactly true. When the AFL-CIO tried to unionize my workforce, they staged three days of noisy protests outside my factory. The police forces just stood around and watched as the protesters intimidated my workers, vandalized their cars and destroyed my property.
You say “we†like the government and society are the same. They aren’t. My company and my community and you politicians are not “weâ€.
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Another Stanford fan signing himself neodymian60 remarked in disgust:
I’ll weigh in because she could be my next Senator and the Democrats here are scrambling to unseat Scott Brown. Somehow she seems like the perfect insufferable replacement for the insufferable Ted Kennedy.
She has the big 3. Harvard. Lawyer. Academic. Check.
She is shrill, contentious, and condescending as only the elite can be.
While any idiot knows that there can be no market without roads and consumers, she insults everyone’s intelligence by having to explain that to them. And then insults the successful by making it seem as if they have betrayed everyone with their talents. …
I just got a call from the Brown campaign and gave them $110.
You built a factory out there? Good for you,” she says. “But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.”
Um – the thing is – those who built the factory and employed the workers generated the revenue that allowed the ctizens to pay for the roads, police etc. It sure as hell wasn’t built by the poor.
She continues: “Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”
Um – again. THEY HAVE ALREADY BEEN DOING THAT. Hey if she questions that – just go to a town that revolved around a factory that went out of business and see how that town is faring. The factory – as it employs the citizens and pays its taxes etc (not to mention all its fees etc under the various regulations/licensing requirements) IS TAKING A HUNK OF THAT AND PAY(ING) IT FORWARD FOR THE NEXT KED WHO COMES ALONG.” Course if the factory shuts down – then that kid loses that opportunity and the town loses a whole lot of revenue.
Elizabeth the Harvard and Rutgers Prof, Head of TARP, lawyer, marxist, head of consumer affairs, candidate for US senate in Mass. friend of Obama, friend of Harry Reid…
If anyone on this board doubts that she is for the social contract that successful people need share their success with those who aren`t successful and have no cause for personal celebration or reward, that she intends that wealth redistribution is necessary and good, that she is not a marxist, you must be Palcal. There is no successful individual except those who have earned it on the backs of others and therefore owe the masses. There are no successful countries except those that earned it on the backs of other countries and therefore owe those countries.
Thus the apology tour at the initial stages of the Obama administration, the rage at successful people, the class warfare rhetoric. She and Obama are two peas in a pod, share the same values and cannot be called anything but Marxist redistributionists. To me, this is the antithetical behavior and value of what made the US exceptional and why the country is headed into the deep morass with policies that slowly and quickly drain the wealth of America over the world.
Gosh, it looks like some Stanford grads must have gone into business and become conservative.
U.S. Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000
Federal budget: $3,820,000,000,000
New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000
National debt: $14,271,000,000,000
Recent [April] budget cut: $ 38,500,000,000
Let’s remove 8 zeros and pretend it’s a household budget:
Annual family income: $21,700
Money the family spent: $38,200
New debt on the credit card: $16,500
Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710
Budget cuts: $385
Joe Queenan tells us he has had a bellyful of boasting about the rising generation’s resume-burnishing, do-good activities.
Joe is lucky that he doesn’t have to read the Yale Alumni Magazine.
Deep inside, everybody wants to talk about what a sensitive, caring, wonderful human being he is. But this is impossible when you work for a law firm that cold-calls Colombian drug dealers to see if they need any extra legal representation, when you’ve publicly boasted about cheating on your taxes, when everyone knows you’ve had an affair with an underage roadie for a Flock of Seagulls tribute band, when you’ve moved into a gated community to avoid even having to breathe the same air as minorities.
So instead, you tell people how jaw-droppingly great your children are. Britney is spending the summer working for Habitat for Humanity. So is Courtney. Dylan is in Burkina Faso, teaching local wretches how to make designer T-shirts out of organic mangoes. Aisha is interning at a company that designs noiseless, subterranean windmills. Yes, Kayla is getting a law degree, but only so she can help political prisoners from Darfur get green cards. And Caitlin and Skyler are spending junior year abroad participating in demonstrations against the governments in Athens, Damascus and Tehran, as course work for their degrees in Global Goodness Studies.
Wherever something truly wonderful is being done, these kids are at the epicenter of the action. They make the Little Sisters of the Poor look like thugs.
The upwardly moral children of the bourgeoisie are obsequiously, uncompromisingly virtuous. They ride bikes everywhere. They never eat meat. They refuse to watch television. They eat with wooden chopsticks. They only read books by authors named Jonathan who live in Brooklyn. They themselves are named Jonathan and live in Brooklyn. That is because everyone who is good and just and whip-smart and special in this society lives in Brooklyn. If you had good children like mine, you would know that. Your children probably live somewhere horrid, like Toledo, Ohio. And they’re probably named Susie or Fred.
As a mean-spirited, amoral crank who has labored mightily to raise reasonably insensitive kids, I find precociously virtuous children revolting. Luckily, I don’t have any. I don’t want my kids bailing out the faceless Trans-Caucasus masses or helping Jimmy Carter hammer nails in Detroit. I want them to be rich, so they can buy me a chalet in the Alps or at least cover my geriatric wisdom-teeth extractions. I grew up poor; I’m looking for payback.
Naval Consolidated Brig (NAVCONBRIG), Miramar, California, where the Gay & Proud are going to wind up.
The New York Times published today a story gloating over the kadavergehorsam, a German term for “corpse-like military obedience,” exemplified yesterday by the Marine Corps, on the day of the termination of DADT by presidential edict, responding to orders by sending Marine recruiters to a Gay community center in Tulsa.
From a libertarian perspective, I must grudgingly admit that William Clinton’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy was clever and an ideal compromise. If one actually believed (which I do not) that there exists a numerically significant responsible, patriotic homosexual constituency with a hankering to serve in the military, then any homosexual able to behave responsibly and with dignity and self-restraint was free to serve.
The Gay Rights Movement and the left-wing establishment were not content, however, with any compromise, even one achieving the substance of the issue in question. The left is by nature totalitarian, and invariably determined to impose its ideology coercively and completely. Getting the practical result desired is never enough, the left’s victory must be total. Opponents in the culture wars must be defeated and occupied and forcibly converted. It does not matter a bit that no significant numbers of choreographers and interior decorators really desire to share the burdens and sacrifices of military service. The symbolic victory of planting the lavender flag in the most sacred territory of national cultural opponents, ordinary non-urban Americans with traditional moral values and traditional religious faith, who actually do serve in the military, had to be inflicted and enjoyed.
But the left is overlooking the fact that the US military has known this day was coming, and has had months and months to devote to plans and preparations.
What would you do if you were a staff officer assigned to prepare for the end of DADT?
I am quite sure that the US military has issued very detailed and comprehensive special orders and instructions for strict scrutiny of personnel conduct and is now fully prepared to enforce military discipline and maintain good order. When triumphant activists begin using the US military for Gay Pride demonstrations (which some will surely attempt to do), we are quickly going to see the offenders going straight to the brig to experience the full weight and rigor of military discipline. New protocols and procedures are undoubtedly set in place, locked and loaded, you might say, to keep watch for and to prosecute vigorously cases of inappropriate fraternization, favoritism, and sexual harassment. Flamboyant and misbehaving homosexuals will quickly find themselves in military prisons.
We are going to elect a Republican president and Congress in 2012. I would not be in the least surprised if, in the aftermath of the scandals connected with homosexual misbehavior in the armed forces which are surely coming, the next president reverses President Obama’s policy. What one president can do by executive order, the next can undo.
House Speaker John Boehner made it clear in a speech to small business owners at the University of Cincinnati Monday that he is not in sync with the president’s plan to raise the tax rates of the wealthiest Americans.
“Giving the federal government more money would be like giving a cocaine addict more cocaine,” the West Chester Republican told about 100 members of the Goering Center for Family and Private Business at UC’s Alumni Center.
Obama knew perfectly well that the Republican-controlled House would never go along with an any-prospects-of-recovery-killing plan to raise taxes on the only sector of society capable of new investment and new job creation.
What Obama was doing was affirming his commitment to left-wing orthodoxy by embracing class warfare as an attempt to appeal to voters’ worst impulses.
The president unleashes his inner Alinksy this morning with the release of his proposal for massive tax hikes, mostly on high income earners, accounting tricks and childish rhetoric. It is clear he has decided to run hard left in 2012, with all the tiresome cliches that involves.
The plan is a sham of course, an election year set-up just like the absurd demand in the Joint Session of Congress for Stimulus 2.0. This new, new plan isn’t dead upon arrival; it was dead before sending. And everyone knows it. Politico’s Mike Allen details the massive spin put on the highly partisan plan last night by the president’s tap-dancing and desperate team, but no one is fooled. Everything the president ever said about “working across the aisle” is trashed. The Chicago way is in the saddle. It’s the only way he and his advisors know.
The very good news is that the country knows, even if the MSM doesn’t.
From CBS News: “(CBS/AP) WASHINGTON — House Republican leaders say they are rejecting President Barack Obama’s jobs proposals to rebuild schools and blighted neighborhoods, and help keep state and local employees on the job.â€
Oh, come on, CBS, you can do better:
(CBS/AP) WASHINGTON — House Republican leaders say they are rejecting President Barack Obama’s jobs proposals to rebuild schools and blighted neighborhoods, and help keep state and local employees on the job, and cure cancer and help the lame walk again, and find good homes for puppy dogs and kitty cats, and take a sunrise and sprinkle it with dew and cover it with chocolate and a miracle or two, and teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, and grow apple trees and honey bees and snow white turtledoves, and slow the rise of the oceans, and begin to heal our planet.
There has been a fair amount of comment in certain alumni circles about the latest Ivy League kerfuffle: Harvard University’s effort, at the beginning of this year’s Fall Term, to “encourage” freshmen to sign a kindness pledge.
Harvard’s new initiative provoked some serious criticism noting that students were likely to feel pressured to sign (as a copy of the pledge with each student’s name and a space for a signature was placed hanging in each entryway), but Harvard then apologized and retreated (being so nice, after all).
Not surprisingly, the incident produced a good deal of coverage, and some mockery.
Ross Douthat (who attended the little school in Cambridge) responded to Virginia Postrel’s reaction in Bloomberg by explaining that there is a bit more to elite Ivy League nicey-goodiness than may be recognized by outsiders not fully acquainted with the culture and patterns of expression of this particular tribe.
[There is an] element of ruthlessness that runs through the culture of elite colleges, and… the prevailing spirit of deference and niceness is a defense mechanism and a facade — a kind of ritualized politesse, like the elaborate bowing and flowery compliments of a 17th century European court, that conceals the vaulting ambitions and furious rivalries that actually predominate on campus. (The essential ruthlessness of the meritocracy was one of the themes of my own subsequent attempt to distill the culture of elite education.) Which is why I appreciated how Postrel’s column finishes up.
Harvard is the strongest brand in American higher education, and its identity is clear. As its students recognize, Harvard represents success. But, it seems, Harvard feels guilty about that identity and wishes it could instead (or also) represent “compassion.†These two qualities have a lot in common. They both depend on other people, either to validate success or serve as objects of compassion. And neither is intellectual.
Rochefoucauld observed that hypocrisy was the tribute that vice pays to virtue.
I suppose it would be fair to say that constant poses of kindness and compassion are the tribute, these days, that the excessively ambitious and success-obsessed pay to failure.
“My board scores and grades were infinitely better than yours. I’m going to Harvard and on to a prominent bank or law firm and seven figures annually. But I will support plenty of welfare entitlement programs for you losers down in the bad neighborhood.”
Maureen Dowd compares the prospective 2012 electoral contest between Rick Perry and normal American Republicans and Barack Obama and the coastal pseudo-intellectual elites to the rivalrous friendship of Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) and Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) in John Ford’s 1962 film “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”
In the film, rugged rancher and man of violence John Wayne befriends the tenderfoot, man of peace, attorney James Stewart and defends him against the outlaw Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin). When the code of manhood obliges Stewart to stand up to Marvin in a gunfight. Wayne, well of aware of Stewart’s incompetence, casually plugs Marvin with his rifle from ambush at the crucial moment in the gun duel.
John Wayne chivalrously lets Stewart receive the credit for ending Liberty Valance’s local reign of terror, which carries Stewart onward into a political career ending in the US Senate. He even stands aside and allows the lawyer (who owes him his life) to marry the girl he loves.
John Ford means his film to depict his own vision of tragic Historicism, in which manly bravery and larger-than-life frontier individualism is inevitably swept away by Progress and the advance of Civilization. John Wayne’s character is obviously the better man, but he is not the man of the future. He steps aside for Stewart because he recognizes it himself.
The John Wayne character isn’t only more competent than the Jimmy Stewart character, he is wiser and nobler.
The secondary tragedy of the movie is revealed when the Stewart character who has returned in old age, covered with success and honors and still married to the girl, to the frontier town which was the original scene of events for the Wayne character’s funeral.
Jimmy Stewart tries telling the whole story of the shooting of Liberty Valance to a young reporter, and revealing that his whole career has been built on another man’s deed, and the newspaper’s editor declines to print it. “When the legend becomes fact,†the editor says, “print the legend.”
There is no expiation in confession for Stewart. His life has been built upon a lie, and he supplanted a better man in his wife’s affections, and he knows it.
Dowd simplifies John Ford’s narrative into the conflict between the Eastern egghead and the anti-intellectual.
At the cusp of the 2012 race, we have a classic cultural collision between a skinny Eastern egghead lawyer who’s inept in Washington gunfights and a pistol-totin’, lethal-injectin’, square-shouldered cowboy who has no patience for book learnin’.
Dowd goes on to examine, and find unworthy, Rick Perry’s college grades.
Studying to be a veterinarian, he stumbled on chemistry and made a D one semester and an F in another. “Four semesters of organic chemistry made a pilot out of me,†said Perry, who went on to join the Air Force.
What a pity it is that the Egghead Barack Obama has never seen fit to release any of his college or law school grades for comparison.
The self-flattering interpretation of the political conflict between democrats and Republicans, between Maureen Dowd and the rest of the community of fashion and ordinary Americans, and potentially in 2012 between Barack Obama and Rick Perry as the conflict between the forces of book learning and the uninformed is doubtless gratifying to New York Times’ readers, but personally I think the claim of members in good standing of our establishment culture to represent learning and intellectuality has a lot of problems.
The kind of learning that most of these people boast isn’t book learning at all. It’s merely Cliff Notes summary familiarity with names and what they’re famous for.
Our establishment elite does not draw its understanding and conclusions from a reservoir of learning in the traditional Western canon. Our establishment is commonly hostile to that canon, deprecatory of its value and significance, and characteristically Philistine. Establishment judgments and conclusions come much more commonly from a consensus produced by newspaper editorials and articles in journals of opinion.
Our community of fashion is not intellectually inquisitive or critical. On the contrary, it is herd-like and conformist. And it is profoundly intellectually reactionary, being totally and entirely committed to defending late 19th century ideas revolving around Utopian ameliorism effectuated via the rule of scientific experts operating under a rubric of collectivist statism.
People who are gullible enough to believe in Anthropogenic Global Warming, people who have failed to notice Socialism’s failures, people who still think that Keynesian economics will get you out of a recession are not smart. They are dumb.
The democrat party and the American community of fashion are comprised not of Eggheads, but of pseudo-intellectuals and muttonheads.
