Thursday, July 19, 2012
“If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that.
Somebody else made that happen.”
— Barack Obama, Roanoke, Va., July 13
And who might that somebody else be? Government, says
Obama. It built the roads you drive on. It provided the teacher who inspired
you. It “created the Internet.” It represents the embodiment of “we’re in this
together” social solidarity that, in Obama’s view, is the essential origin of
individual and national achievement.
To say 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.
Moreover, the greatest threat to a robust, autonomous
civil society is the ever-growing Leviathan state and those like Obama who see
it as the ultimate expression of the collective.
Obama compounds the fallacy by declaring the state to be
the font of entrepreneurial success. How so? It created the infrastructure —
roads, bridges, schools, Internet — off which we all thrive.
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 conceived and built 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.
The ultimate Obama fallacy, however, is the conceit that
belief in the value of infrastructure — and willingness to invest in its
creation and maintenance — is what divides liberals from conservatives.
More nonsense. Infrastructure is not a liberal idea, nor
is it particularly new. The Via Appia was built 2,300 years ago. The Romans
built aqueducts too. And sewers. Since forever, infrastructure has been
consensually understood to be a core function of government.
The argument between Left and Right is about what you do
beyond infrastructure. It’s about transfer payments and redistributionist
taxation; about geometrically expanding entitlements; about tax breaks and
subsidies to induce actions pleasing to central planners. It’s about free
contraceptives for privileged students and welfare without work — the latest
Obama entitlement-by-decree that would fatally undermine the great bipartisan
welfare reform of 1996. It’s about endless government handouts that, ironically,
are crowding out necessary spending on, yes, infrastructure.
What divides liberals and conservatives is not roads and
bridges, but Julia’s world, an Obama-campaign creation that may be the most
self-revealing parody of liberalism ever conceived. It’s a series of cartoon
illustrations in which a fictional Julia is swaddled and subsidized throughout
her life by an all-giving government of bottomless pockets and “Queen for a
Day” magnanimity. At every stage, the state is there to provide — preschool classes
and cut-rate college loans, birth control and maternity care, business loans
and retirement. The only time she’s on her own is at her gravesite.
Julia’s world is totally atomized. It contains no
friends, no community and, of course, no spouse. Who needs one? She’s married
to the provider state.
Or to put it slightly differently, the “Life of Julia”
represents the paradigmatic Obama political philosophy: citizen as orphan
child. For the conservative, providing for every need is the duty that government
owes to actual orphan children. Not to supposedly autonomous adults.
Beyond infrastructure, the conservative sees the proper
role of government as providing not European-style universal entitlements but a
firm safety net, meaning Julia-like treatment for those who really cannot make
it on their own — those too young or too old, too mentally or physically
impaired, to provide for themselves.
Limited government so conceived has two indispensable
advantages. It avoids inexorable European-style national insolvency. And it
avoids breeding debilitating individual dependency. It encourages and
celebrates character, independence, energy, and hard work as the foundations of
a free society and a thriving economy — precisely the virtues Obama discounts
and devalues in his accounting of the wealth of nations.
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