Thursday, July 19, 2012
There was a time, within living memory, when the
achievements of others were not only admired but were often taken as an
inspiration for imitation of the same qualities that had served these achievers
well, even if we were not in the same field of endeavor and were not expecting
to achieve on the same scale.
The perseverance of Thomas Edison, as he tried scores of
materials for the filament of the light bulb; the dedication of Abraham Lincoln
as he studied law on his own while struggling to make a living — these were
things young people were taught to admire, even if they had no intention of
becoming inventors or lawyers, much less president of the United States.
Somewhere along the way, all that changed. Today, the
very concept of achievement is de-emphasized and sometimes attacked. Following
in the footsteps of Barack Obama, Professor Elizabeth Warren of Harvard has
made the downgrading of high achievers the centerpiece of her election campaign
against Senator Scott Brown.
To cheering audiences, Professor Warren says, “there is
nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You build 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 that the rest of us paid
to educate.”
Do the people who cheer this kind of talk bother to stop
and think through what she is saying? Or is heady rhetoric enough for them?
People who run businesses are benefiting from things paid
for by others? Since when are people in business, or high-income earners in
general, exempt from paying taxes like everybody else?
At a time when a small fraction of high-income taxpayers
pay the vast majority of all the taxes collected, it is sheer chutzpah to
depict high-income earners as somehow subsidized by “the rest of us,” whether
through paying for the building of roads or the educating of the young.
Since everybody else uses the roads and the schools, why
should high achievers be expected to feel like freeloaders who owe still more
to the government, because schools and roads are among the things that
facilitate their work? According to Elizabeth Warren, it’s because it is part
of an “underlying social contract.”
Conjuring up some mythical agreement that nobody saw,
much less signed, is an old ploy of the Left — one that goes back at least a
century, when Herbert Croly, the first editor of The New Republic magazine,
wrote a book titled “The Promise of American Life.”
Whatever policy Herbert Croly happened to favor was
magically transformed by rhetoric into a “promise” that American society was
supposed to have made — and, implicitly, that American taxpayers should be
forced to pay for. This pious hokum was so successful politically that all
sorts of “social contracts” began to appear magically in the rhetoric of the
Left.
If talking in this mystical way is enough to give you
control of billions of the taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars, why not?
Certainly someone who claimed to be part Indian, as
Elizabeth Warren did when applying for academic appointments in an
affirmative-action environment, is unlikely to be squeamish about using
imaginative words during a political-election campaign.
Sadly, this kind of cute use of words is not confined to
one political candidate or to this election year. The very concept of
achievement is a threat to the vision of the Left, and has long been attacked
by those on the Left.
People who succeed — whether in business or anywhere else
— are often said to be “privileged,” even if they started out poor and worked
their way up the hard way.
Outcome differences are called “class” differences. Thus
when two white women, who came from families of very similar social and
economic circumstances, made different decisions and got different results,
this was the basis for a front-page story titled “Two Classes, Divided by ‘I
Do’“ in the July 15 issue of the New York Times. Personal responsibility,
whether for achievement or failure, is a threat to the whole vision of the
Left, and a threat it goes all-out to combat, using rhetoric uninhibited by
reality.
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