Obama: There are No Self-Made Men?

If “others did that” and made lots of people successful, why did these “others” turn their backs on so many minorities? Are you telling me that the government (which provided the necessary components for success) dissed all these dependent people that it now wants to vote them another term?

What is missing from the conversation is the question: what system best promotes the welfare of society as a whole? One where the government takes all the money and redistributes it "fairly" or one where people keep most of the money they earn and use it as they wish? The Obama admin and lib/leftists in general are trying to make the argument that because a small percentage of the public, the very poor, cannot compete with the rest of the producers, the producers should be penalized.

It's a stupid argument to say because government builds roads, they deserve to take a lion's share of your income and redistribute it. That's like telling a writer because other people built the writing equipment he or she used to write their works, they don't deserve what they've earned.

"...Harry Truman was called a traitor by Richard Nixon. Harry reportedly called Nixon an SOB. When Harry was questioned about it he said, “I would never call him that: after all, he claims to be a self-made man.”...."

ergo....

” In a capitalist system, each one of us tends to receive an amount equal to our marginal contribution to nation’s output of goods and services. That is, each of us tends to receive an income equal to our contribution to generating national income.”

This is the critical point Obama doesn’t understand. He views the economy as a fixed pie, the only issue being how to divide it “fairly.” He doesn’t understand either the idea of positive sum gains—that the rich get rich by CREATING value, not taking it away from others—or the idea of value-added.

Innovators and entrepreneurs benefit from identical roads and schools that everyone else does. But their economic reward is related to the ADDITIONAL value they add to the system by inventing/building a better mousetrap—something that no one else did and would exist BUT for their creativity/effort. Thus, one cannot legitimately attribute their riches to the roads and schools since if it were simply a matter of providing schools and roads, then EVERYONE should have been able to invent Windows or the iPad or the cell phone etc. That this didn’t happen proves that the creators bring something to the table that others lack and in a fair society should be compensated accordingly.

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