Did the State Make You Great?

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Here I am stirring the pot again. From Charles Krauthammer http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/310088/did-state-make-you-great-charles-krauthammer

Ūf youÃ×e got a business you didnÃÕ build that. Somebody else made that happen. Barack Obama, Roanoke, Va., July 13 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 ÅÄreated the Internet. It represents the embodiment of ÅØeÃÓe in this together social solidarity that, in ObamaÃÔ view, is the essential origin of individual and national achievement. To say 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 donÃÕ credit the Swiss postal service with the Special Theory of Relativity because it transmitted EinsteinÃÔ manuscript to the Annalen der Physik. Everyone drives the roads, goes to school, uses the mails. So did Steve Jobs. Yet only he conceived and built the Mac and the iPad. ObamaÃÔ infrastructure argument is easily refuted by what is essentially a controlled social experiment. Roads and schools are the constant. WhatÃÔ 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. ItÃÔ about transfer payments and redistributionist taxation; about geometrically expanding entitlements; about tax breaks and subsidies to induce actions pleasing to central planners. ItÃÔ 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. ItÃÔ 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 JuliaÃÔ world, an Obama-campaign creation that may be the most self-revealing parody of liberalism ever conceived. ItÃÔ 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 Ųueen 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 sheÃÔ on her own is at her gravesite. JuliaÃÔ world is totally atomized. It contains no friends, no community and, of course, no spouse. Who needs one? SheÃÔ married to the provider state. Or to put it slightly differently, the Å*ife 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, and 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. Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist. Ž© 2012 the Washington Post Writers Group.

[punjabi_khota]

The whole argument is based on a misspoken sentence. He meant you didn't build the roads. Not the business.

[Lurker]

Strictly speaking from an Indian perspective, yes it did. Most Indians of my generation have reaped the benefits of hugely subsidized education in some of the best colleges in a country of billion plus. If we were born and raised in US both me and you CA, and PK and Clarke and everybody else would have their backside in huge debts right now :winky:

[seedhi]

I read this article some time back. The pertinent point of the article that struck me was the following para:

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.

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Strictly speaking from an Indian perspective, yes it did. Most Indians of my generation have reaped the benefits of hugely subsidized education in some of the best colleges in a country of billion plus. If we were born and raised in US both me and you CA, and PK and Clarke and everybody else would have their backside in huge debts right now :winky:

Without a doubt. As have people like Azim Premji, Ratan Tata, Narayanamurthy etc. The difference is that - they used that education and gave back multiple-fold, while folks like us did not. So, should we hit the with more tax penalties? That would be absurd.

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I read this article some time back. The pertinent point of the article that struck me was the following para:

seedhi and Silva, I totally appreciate y'all's insights here :-). We need more of us to balance the lefts here!

[Lurker]

Without a doubt. As have people like Azim Premji' date=' Ratan Tata, Narayanamurthy etc. The difference is that - they used that education and gave back multiple-fold, while folks like us did not. So, should we hit the with more tax penalties? That would be absurd.[/quote'] You have selected the good people there CA. Smart guys who have given back a lot to India already. If you raised the tax limit on them, these folks would hardly complain. On the other hand try the mongrels like the boss of DLF and see how he complains. The first lot is more like Buffett, the latter like Romney and Adelson :winky:

[seedhi]

seedhi and Silva' date=' I totally appreciate y'all's insights here :-). We need more of us to balance the lefts here![/quote']I am not really leaning either way, I just thought that the paragraph neatly condensed the arguments into that of the position of a threshold.

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You have selected the good people there CA. Smart guys who have given back a lot to India already. If you raised the tax limit on them, these folks would hardly complain. On the other hand try the mongrels like the boss of DLF and see how he complains. The first lot is more like Buffett, the latter like Romney and Adelson :winky:

Just because they won't complain does not mean it is the right thing to do. Would they take it lying down if we squeezed their companies for more and more? When WB tried it with Ratan Tata, he took his ball and went to play with Narendra Modi. Also, Warren Buffett whose company hasn't paid its rightful share since 2002? Reeks of hypocrisy on his part, right? Again, not wanting to pay more taxes must not be mistaken for a lack of compassion. It only reflects a lack of trust in the government to use that money wisely. And there is evidence abound that the government does lack that ability.

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I am not really leaning either way' date=' I just thought that the paragraph neatly condensed the arguments into that of the position of a threshold.[/quote'] I wish I could write as eloquently and dispassionately as Krauthammer. Instead, I find myself needing a stiff drink every time I go on a posting binge here :-).

[Lurker]

Just because they won't complain does not mean it is the right thing to do. Would they take it lying down if we squeezed their companies for more and more? When WB tried it with Ratan Tata' date= he took his ball and went to play with Narendra Modi. Also, Warren Buffett whose company hasn't paid its rightful share since 2002? Reeks of hypocrisy on his part, right? Again, not wanting to pay more taxes must not be mistaken for a lack of compassion. It only reflects a lack of trust in the government to use that money wisely. And there is evidence abound that the government does lack that ability.

They would not mind, certainly not those who you have mentioned, when their companies are making record profits in a bad economy. Even after paying higher taxes they would still make a better YoY (Year over Year) profits. I would be standing with you if these companies were hard hit by bad economy and barely managing through. With regards to West Bengal I am sure you realize that is very different issue CA.:--D:--D

[seedhi]

The problem with government profligacy is that it - along with the democracy based system - creates reinforcing cycles. For example, in the Indian context - things like subsidies and reservations, once put in place are very difficult to reverse (especially the latter). It is generally easy to dole things out rather than the reverse. Europe, India and many parts of the world have learnt this the hard way.

[Brainfade]

The problem with government profligacy is that it - along with the democracy based system - creates reinforcing cycles. For example' date=' in the Indian context - things like subsidies and reservations, once put in place are very difficult to reverse (especially the latter).[/quote'] It is not just India; that very same culture has brought Europe to its knees. At the root of the problem is the creation of a society where it is considered un-compassionate to rein in wasteful government spending excesses, and oppose budgetary increases that perpetuate this waste. The US is at the precipice of fully embracing this culture, if it has not done so already. It happens even at the private college where I teach. We start a program. It gets entrenched and complacent after a few years. When it starts to fail or shows clear signs of inefficient operation, one has to move heaven and earth to cut its budget until it gets its house in order. And it is especially true when there are middle management jobs on the line. When someone brings these tough issues to the table for serious discussion, they are singled out for not being compassionate, and for having an ulterior agenda. The result? The programs continue on their merry way and their budgets are supported by increasing tuition.

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The Washington DC bubble. Another apt article. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/08/16/the_washington_dc_bubble_115129.html

A long, brutal recession is prompting a certain degree of soul-searching and even philosophical debate in this election year. One example is a piece of honest introspection from a left-leaning commentator who stumbles upon an important truth while still showing us the cultural and philosophical blinders of the mainstream cultural elites. The honest part is a sort of inadvertent admission of those blinders. In a piece mostly devoted to denouncing Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke for failing to print more money, Jonathan Chait ends up offering a poignant reflection on the distance between the cultural elites in Washington, DC-including himself-and those who are suffering in this economy. "The political scientist Larry Bartels has found (and measured) that members of Congress respond much more strongly to the preferences of their affluent constituents than their poor ones. And for affluent people, there is essentially no recession. Unemployment for workers with a bachelors degree is 4 percent-boom times. Unemployment is also unusually low in the Washington, D.C., area, owing to our economy's reliance on federal spending, which has not had to impose the punishing austerity of so many state and local governments." This is horrifically understated. Washington "has not had to impose austerity"? Well of course it hasn't! Washington has sucked an extra trillion dollars out of the economy and sent it through the conduits of the federal bureaucracy, employing tens of thousands of college-educated, middle-class functionaries to process all of the stimulus checks and write all of the new regulations. And an awful lot of those stimulus checks have been sent out through the local mail. A recent New York Times article crowing about the DC area's affluence reveals that "the District of Columbia's [has] received more stimulus dollars per capita than any state." So what Mr. Chait really should say is that he lives in a giant boomtown, as insulated from everyone else's misery as a courtier at Louis XIV's Versailles. But on some level he knows this, and here comes the real moment of candor, of admission against interest. "I live in a Washington neighborhood almost entirely filled with college-educated professionals, and it occurred to me not long ago that, when my children grow up, they'll have no personal memory of having lived through the greatest economic crisis in eighty years. It is more akin to a famine in Africa. For millions and millions of Americans, the economic crisis is the worst event of their lives. They have lost jobs, homes, health insurance, opportunities for their children, seen their skills deteriorate, and lost their sense of self-worth. But from the perspective of those in a position to alleviate their suffering, the crisis is merely a sad and distant tragedy." Here is what Mr. Chait has never asked himself. If all of this is true, if the elites in Washington are insulated from the rest of the country, don't grasp what is at stake for everyone else, and have no real incentive to act in those people's interests-then why on earth would we ever look to those elites for our salvation? Why should we give them vast and unprecedented power over the economy and depend on their stimulus money to put bread in our children's mouths? What Mr. Chait doesn't realize is that he has stumbled across one of the central arguments against big government and the welfare state: the fact that big government tends to become its own entrenched interest, responding to the special pleading of its lobbyists and hangers-on, without being able or willing to respond to all of the needs and priorities of the millions of individuals outside the capital. He doesn't see this because he's living in the real bubble that imprisons the mainstream cultural elites. It's not a bubble of complacent prosperity. It's an ideological bubble in which economic, political, and moral ideas outside the catechism of the bien-pensant liberal don't exist and need not be confronted. This is demonstrated by the first half of the piece, which basically accuses Republicans of callous disregard for the poor because they don't want another housing bailout and another Keynesian stimulus. Surely, he must be aware that there is a whole school of free-market economics which regards all of this as a waste of money and a way of making the economy worse. If he doesn't know that, Arthur Laffer reminds him in the Wall Street Journal by making the case that everywhere it has been implemented, government "stimulus" has actually slowed down the economy. But this is outside the Keynesian mainstream and can simply be dismissed as an argument not worth taking seriously. The reason why the ideological bubble of mainstream liberalism is so resistant to being punctured is that it is part of a moral bubble: an unchallenged belief in the morality of welfare-state altruism. In the altruist worldview, supporting yourself and providing for your own needs has no moral significance, but providing for the needs of others makes you virtuous. And the best position of all is to be the middleman distributing those handouts from the haves to the have-nots. It doesn't require you to sacrifice your own prosperity, but it still gives you the moral high ground of being the agent for the redistribution of wealth. The welfare-state altruist thinks government is the answer to every problem because it follows this altruist model: a benevolent elite providing handouts to support the helpless little guy. But Chait's own column gives a clue to the profound moral failure of this approach. It encourages the individual to outsource the responsibility for supporting his own life, waiting for largess from distant bureaucrats who are not necessarily benevolent. And precisely because these middlemen live off of an unlimited stream of free money-tax money taken from our paychecks, or dollars summoned out of thin air by the Federal Reserve-they continue to prosper and advance regardless of whether their vast federal projects actually help anyone. This is the way the welfare-state altruist "cares." He cares about you in the impersonal way he cares about a famine in Africa. It's just another excuse to raise some money and send it off to be spent on a program that may or may not work (foreign aid is another great example of money spent with very little regard for results) and to skim off a comfortable salary made all the more comfortable by a smug sense of moral superiority. Contrast this to a totally different moral and economic model: the individualist model of trade, production, and exchange. It is a system summed up in the famous line from Adam Smith: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." Like Chait's neighbors, the businessman or investor may live in a comfortable suburb among upper-middle-class professionals and not really know or care what happens to you. The difference is that he doesn't have to care. All he has to do is follow his own interests. If he hires you, it is not because he was overcome by a momentary bout of guilt or compassion. It is because he thinks he can profit by expanding his business. If he reduces the price of the goods you buy, or if he creates some valuable new product or service, likewise it is out of the reliable motive of self-interest. Smith's butcher, brewer, and baker may be portrayed as callous and indifferent, even cruel-but then again, they're not asking you to be dependent on their goodwill and spare change. They are asking you to stand on the more substantial ground of offering value for value. If you want to know which system is actually cruel, think about this from the perspective of the person who looks to the elites in Washington, to Mr. Chait and his neighbors, to solve his problems. This is the cost of dependency: sitting around waiting for a bunch of millionaires and comfortable upper-middle-class types to feel sorry for you and enact a government program-rather than taking your fate into your own hands. But to understand this, you need to be ready to drag yourself all the way out of the Washington bubble. Robert Tracinski writes daily commentary at TIADaily.com. He is the editor of The Intellectual Activist and a contributor to RealClearMarkets. Related Topics: Obama administration, budget, economy

[Clarke]

Strictly speaking from an Indian perspective, yes it did. Most Indians of my generation have reaped the benefits of hugely subsidized education in some of the best colleges in a country of billion plus. If we were born and raised in US both me and you CA, and PK and Clarke and everybody else would have their backside in huge debts right now :winky:

Without a doubt. As have people like Azim Premji' date=' Ratan Tata, Narayanamurthy etc. The difference is that - they used that education and gave back multiple-fold, while folks like us did not. So, should we hit the with more tax penalties? That would be absurd.[/quote'] In the words of honorable Sir Eric Cartman, "***** u guys, i'm going home" :isalute: Ahaa, what about those states rights Messiah Romney uses to justify MA's health care reform ? WB & Gujarat aren't allowed to use their rights to govern their way ? Besides, federal & state regulations are different discussions. You set up the plant in WB or Gujarat, the revenue stays inside the country. If Ratan Tata goes John Galt and sets up the plant in Thailand to import cars to India and make bigger profits, MMS & PC will tax the **** out of him. Good luck selling the Indicas in India then. It doesn't mean India's a good place to do business, its actually one of the worst. But the point here is 25% isn't the 'fair' tax that u right wingers dream about, far from it.