Saturday, July 21, 2012
On the evidence of last week’s Republican campaign
events, President Obama’s instant classic — “You didn’t build that” — is to
Mitt Romney what that radioactive arachnid is to Spider-Man: It got under his
skin, and, in an instant, the geeky stiff was transformed into a muscular
Captain Capitalism swinging through the streets and deftly squirting his
webbing all over Community-Organizerman. Rattled by the reborn Romney, the
Obama campaign launched an attack on Romney’s attack on Obama’s attack on
American business. First they showed Romney quoting Obama: “He said, ‘If you’ve
got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.’” And
then the Obama team moved in for the kill: “The only problem? That’s not what
he said.”
Indeed. What Obama actually said was:
“If you’ve got a business, you, you didn’t build that.
[Interjection by fawning supporters: “Yeeaaaaah!”] “Somebody else made that
happen.”
Since the president is widely agreed to be “the smartest
guy ever to become president” (Michael Beschloss, presidential historian), the
problem can’t be “what he said” but that you dummies aren’t smart enough to get
the point he was trying to make. According to Slate’s David Weigel, the “you
didn’t build that” bit referred back to something he’d said earlier in the speech
— “somebody invested in roads and bridges.” You didn’t build those, did you? Or
maybe he was referring back to “this unbelievable American system we have that
allowed you to thrive.” You didn’t build the system, did you? Or maybe he was
referring to the teleprompter. You didn’t build that, did you? Well, unless
you’re Rajiv or Suresh from the teleprompter factory in Bangalore, you didn’t.
Maybe he was referring back to something he said in a totally different speech
— the Berlin Wall one, perhaps. You didn’t build that, did you? Who are we to
say which of these highly nuanced interpretations of the presidential text is
correct?
If this is the best all the king’s horses and all the
king’s men can do to put Humpty Dumpty’s silver-tongued oratory together again,
they might as well cut to the chase and argue that accurately quoting President
Obama is racist. The obvious interpretation sticks because it fits with the
reality of the last three and a half years — that America’s chief executive is
a man entirely ignorant of business who presides over an administration
profoundly hostile to it.
But, just for the record, I did “invest in roads and
bridges,” and so did you. In fact, every dime in those roads and bridges comes
from taxpayers, because government doesn’t have any money except for what it
takes from the citizenry. And the more successful you are, the more you pay for
those roads and bridges.
So here’s a breaking-news alert for President Nuance: We
small-government guys are in favor of roads. Hard as it may be to credit, roads
predated Big Government. Which came first, the chicken crossing the road or the
Egg Regulatory Agency? That’s an easy one: Halfway through the first millennium
b.c., the nomadic Yuezhi of Central Asia had well-traveled trading routes for
getting nephrite jade from the Tarim Basin to their customers at the Chinese
court over 2,500 miles away. On the other hand, the Yuezhi did not have a
federal contraceptive mandate or a Bloombergian enforcement regime for
carbonated beverages at concession stands at the rest area two days out of
Khotan, so that probably explains why they’re not in the G-7 today.
In Obama’s world, businessmen build nothing, whereas
government are the hardest hard-hats on the planet. So, in his “you didn’t
build that” speech, he invoked, yet again, the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate
Bridge. “When we invested in the Hoover Dam or the Golden Gate Bridge, or the
Internet, sending a man to the moon — all those things benefited everybody. And
so that’s the vision that I want to carry forward.”
He certainly carries it forward from one dam speech to
another. He was doing his Hoover Dam shtick only last month, and I pointed out
that there seemed to be a certain inconsistency between his enthusiasm for
federal dam-building and the definitive administration pronouncement on the
subject, by Deanna Archuleta, his deputy assistant secretary of the Interior,
in a speech to Democrat environmentalists in Nevada:
“You will never see another federal dam.”
Ever. So the president can carry forward his “vision,”
but it apparently has no more real-world application than the visions he
enjoyed as a member of his high-school “choom gang” back in Hawaii.
Incidentally, I was interested to learn from David Maraniss’s enlightening new biography
that, during car-chooming sessions, young Barry insisted all the windows be
rolled up so that no marijuana smoke would escape. If you can seriously
envision President Obama opening a 21st-century Hoover Dam, you need to lower
the windows on your Chevy Volt.
The Golden Gate Bridge? As Reason’s Matt Welch pointed
out, the Golden Gate cost at the time $35 million — or about $530 million
today. So, for the cost of Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill alone, we could have had
1,567 Golden Gate Bridges. Where are they? Where are, say, the first dozen? If
you laid 1,567 Golden Gate Bridges end to end, you’d have enough for one Golden
Choom Bridge stretching from Obama’s Punahou High School in Honolulu over the
Pacific all the way to his Occidental College in Los Angeles, so that his
car-chooming chums can commute from one to the other without having to worry
about TSA patdowns.
A stimulus bill equivalent to 1,567 Golden Gate bridges.
A 2011 federal budget equivalent to 6,788 Golden Gate bridges. And yet we don’t
have a single one.
Because that’s not what Big Government does:
Money-no-object government spends more and more money for less and less
objects. For all the American economy has to show for it, President Bob the
Builder took just shy of a trillion dollars in stimulus, stuck it in his
wheelbarrow, pushed it halfway across the Golden Gate bridge, and tossed it
into the Pacific.
Instead of roads and bridges, Obama-sized government
funds stasis and sclerosis: The Hoover Dam of regulatory obstruction, the Golden
Gateway to dependency. Last month, 80,000 Americans signed on to new jobs, but
85,000 Americans signed on for Social Security disability checks. Most of these
people are not “disabled” as that term is generally understood. Rather, it’s
the U.S. economy that’s disabled, and thus Obama incentivizes dependency. What
Big Government is doing to those 85,000 “disabled” is profoundly wicked. Let me
quote a guy called Mark Steyn, from his last book:
The evil of such a system is not the waste of money but the waste of people. Tony Blair’s ministry discovered it was politically helpful to reclassify a chunk of the unemployed as “disabled”. A fit, able-bodied 40-year old who has been on disability allowance for a decade understands somewhere at the back of his mind that he is living a lie, and that not just the government but his family and his friends are colluding in that lie.
Millions of Americans have looked at the road ahead, and
figured it goes nowhere. Best to pull off into the Social Security parking lot.
Don’t worry, it’s not your fault. As the president would say, you didn’t build
the express check-in to the Disability Office. Government built it, and,
because they built it, you came. In Obama’s “visions,” he builds roads and
bridges. In reality, the president of Dependistan has put nothing but
roadblocks in the path to opportunity and growth.
That he can build. That’s all he can build.
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