You’re successful, articulate, perceptive and all-knowing? Good for you. But, you didn’t do it on your own. You read Cohen the Columnist. He helped you.
Nobody is successful on their own. Without me to educate and explain, you’d be in the back room, pouting, wondering what went wrong.
Does the argument look familiar? It mimics a bit what Barack Obama said in his infamous summer speech, suggesting that success in business had less to do with the entrepreneurial fervor of the owner than with the bridges and highways and social workers and whatever else government decides to spend money on.
“If you’ve been successful,” Obama said, “you didn’t get there on your own.” He attributed such success to roads and bridges and school teachers; on behalf of the government, he even took credit for creating the Internet.
“If you’ve got a business,” the President thundered, “you didn’t build that. Someone else made that happen.”
Of course, the Romney boys and girls pounced all over those remarks, perhaps distorting them just a bit in translation. But, if you’re in business, if you’re a successful owner, entrepreneur or extraordinary newspaper columnist, the Obama theme was jarring.
Obama’s remarks were not, in any way, unique to him. The instinct to drag the successful, kicking and screaming, back to the warm bosom of “Big Government” is a philosophy that has been around on the lefty side of the political perspective for decades.
When Hillary Clinton instructed us that “it takes a village to raise a child,” she was saying, in a somewhat more delicate way, exactly what Obama was saying. And what Obama uttered that fateful day was equally familiar to those educated in the various rhetorical sources of the lefty fringes of American politics.
Long before Obama had his say, Massachusetts’ teeming masses received their dose of the collectivist sermon from none other than Elizabeth Warren, the lefty hero running for U.S. Senate. Pecking away to her supporters on the Internet last year, it was Warren, not Obama, who had this to say:
“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 make it 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…”
Look familiar? It is the common language of a certain strain of “progressive” ideology that lives in fear that the itch for individual success, for recognition of solo triumph, will diminish our enthusiasm for endless government collectivism.
‘The Paris Miracle’
Of course, the lefty nutballs aren’t completely wrong. Most of us are comfortable with “big government” plowing the roads and arresting the bad guys.
But what the Obama-Warren kind of folks won’t acknowledge is that hard-working, smart individualism, or (dare we say the words out loud?) corporate leverage, also achieves amazing benefits for the collective “we.”
The economic philosopher Bastiat called it the “Paris Miracle.” Everyone in Paris jumped out of bed each morning, raced around all day doing their own self-interested, amoral, acquisitive thing – and by the time they got home at night, everyone in Paris had been fed.
It’s not that one “side” or another has the corner on truth about all this. What makes America great is the sloppy, messy, chaotic coming together of entrepreneurial spirit, consumer freedom and government oversight.
But Barack Obama and Elizabeth Warren sound eerily identical for a reason. The cult that they represent does not harbor any giddy enthusiasm for the “free market” – whether it is a free market of products, services or ideas. They want to tilt the table so the power and the products of success tilt toward government, not toward those out there in the big, bad world.
Mitt Romney? He’s got his own problems. He’s not going to tell successful businessmen that they didn’t get “rich on their own,” but he can’t quite figure out how to articulate an inspiring message to the butcher, baker and candlestick maker, either.
“It takes a village to make a hedge fund.”
I don’t think that would work.
