[Sick of Lefties]

Elizabeth Warren. Aaargh! Who else could make Scott Brown look this good? Go earn your keep, Scott.

[hellinahandcart]

Good article. HHC’s husband

[unkus]

Go earn your keep, Scott.

---

I’m still upset that I sent Scott Brown $ (from Colorado) to beat that other liberal woman. He’d better whip this one’s butt, too.

[The Pack Knight]

Her bankruptcy casebook is actually good. She should stick to that.

[the invisib1e hand]

Gawd this is beauteous.

So much so, and so delightfully and artfully delivered in sharp-shooter fashion, that it grieves me to point out the following glaring blanket statement:

that the rich get that way by offering something of value to others, not by making them poor.

If we massage our definitions of rich, and of value, and of poor, we can make this unequivocally true. Absent that, however, it is simply to general a claim to be valid; and is invalidated by too much recent history.

[monocle]

And how much has the war on poverty cost us? And has the percentage of people living in poverty declined?

[raisetheroof]

[Warren]Nobody in this country got rich on their own -Factory builders, specifically: --Moved goods on roads that the rest of paid for (huzzahs) --Hired workers the rest of us paid to educate --Were safe because of police and fire forces that the rest of us paid for --Didn't have to worry about maurading bands, and to hire someone to protect against them, because of the work the rest of us did.

There's one major flaw in Warren's argument -- it doesn't explain business failures.

If a business' success isn't due to the owner's efforts so much as it is from externalities such as police, fire protection, infrastructure, education and so on, no business would fail, since all businesses use them fairly equally. But the fact is, every day, there are businesses that do fail. If what Warren said was true, these same externalities would have to be responsible for those as well. Though, I doubt that people like Warren are willing to accept that part of the bargain.

That means that something other than these externalities must be the deciding factor. The owner's efforts.