Here's a bit of Krauthammer for the philosophical ones.
Too bad Odd won't read it. His take on the Philosophical matters
would be interesting because of his excellent academical
exposure.


“If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
— Barack Obama,

By Charles Krauthammer, Published: July 19

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 that 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 created 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 grave site.

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, 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.

I just read the first line, and Krauthammer, just like the rest of you right wing dipshits, is purposely taking what the President said out of context, leaving out all the rest of it.

Since I assume he's basing his 'wisdom' on that, there's no reason to read the rest of it.

Purposely misrepresenting it is lying, plain and simple.

Why does the Republican Party have such a hard time with the truth? If they really felt it was on their side they wouldn't have to make up alternate, and false, truths to make all their points.

It's a good thing that only about half the population is dumb enough to believe their lies...well, probably more like a 1/4 believes it...the other 1/4 doesn't care that they are liars, and actually revel in it.

Fish on...

Todd

...and nowhere did the President say that you owe the government your entire business.

Fish on...

Todd

FP, you need to read less of what Hank posts.

Fish on...

Todd

He said that the government created the context in which you built your business...it didn't happen by itself, you didn't do it by yourself, and it wouldn't have happened without someone who gave your mentorship, someone who gave you a helping hand, and/or the government that created the "free market", and the infrastructure needed to run goods and services all over the world between producers and consumers.

To pretend otherwise is idiotic...and to pretend that the government is the enemy of business, when business would not exist without it, is not only idiotic, but it's a lie of epic proportions when those who say it, say it.

Fish on...

Todd

Hey Hey Hey, Leave me the He11 outta this, that Lying Chitbird Commander-In-Thief from Chi-Town already raised my taxes enough the last two years

Maybe the gubmint just hates competition?

Title 28 United States Code 3002(15)(A)

(15) “United States” means—

(A) a Federal corporation;

Linky

hmmmm.....couple that with "corporations are people" and you get............what?

A US citizen, perhaps?

Corporations are Persons. That would be Title 28 United States Code 3002(10) if you read the definitions from the link....