{"id":15121,"date":"2012-07-16T15:37:35","date_gmt":"2012-07-16T19:37:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=15121"},"modified":"2012-07-16T16:12:10","modified_gmt":"2012-07-16T20:12:10","slug":"barack-obama-channels-his-inner-elizabeth-warren","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/15121\/barack-obama-channels-his-inner-elizabeth-warren\/","title":{"rendered":"Barack Obama Channels His Inner Elizabeth Warren"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>2012\u00a0 may be remembered as the year that Barack Obama dropped the mask. Based on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.foxnews.com\/politics\/2012\/07\/15\/obama-dashes-american-dream-suggests-nobody-achieves-success-alone\/\" target=\"_blank\">his remarks at a campaign stop in Roanoke, Virginia on Friday<\/a>, the president has no interest in making his peace with America&#8217;s entrepreneurs. In fact, his remarks there should make their blood run cold:<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><object classid=\"clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000\" width=\"425\" height=\"350\" codebase=\"http:\/\/download.macromedia.com\/pub\/shockwave\/cabs\/flash\/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0\"><param name=\"src\" value=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/192oEC5TX_Q&amp;feature\" \/><embed type=\"application\/x-shockwave-flash\" width=\"425\" height=\"350\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/192oEC5TX_Q&amp;feature\"><\/embed><\/object><br \/>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ve heard this rap before. It sounds suspiciously like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theblaze.com\/stories\/elizabeth-warren-on-class-warfare-there-is-nobody-in-this-country-who-got-rich-on-his-own\/\" target=\"_blank\">Elizabeth Warren&#8217;s pep talk to a room full of agitated Boston liberals.<\/a> But, if anything, Obama&#8217;s remarks are actually worse. Warren didn&#8217;t go so far as to denigrate hard work and intelligence, which the president seems to consider middling factors when it comes to being successful in life (note to the president: I&#8217;d absolutely love to meet these armies of workaholic geniuses who wouldn&#8217;t be succeeding without the federal government).<\/p>\n<p>The asininity per square inch of this speech is pretty daunting, but here are a few corrective notes:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Notice the examples Obama uses &#8212; teachers, firefighters, and infrastructure. These are all (by relatively expansive definitions, anyway) public goods. If there were a caucus of conservatives out there advocating boarding up schools, abolishing fire departments, and moving to a system of rope bridges, the president would have a point, but these are generally uncontroversial examples of public expenditures. Moreover, they&#8217;re not areas that are primarily financed by the federal government. Left unsaid is why taxes should increase to fund green-energy boondoggles like Solyndra, <a href=\"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/12311\/feds-spending-stimulus-money-to-tell-the-public-how-well-theyre-spending-stimulus-money\/\" target=\"_blank\">PR efforts for the stimulus package<\/a>, or <a href=\"http:\/\/dailycaller.com\/2011\/03\/23\/uncle-sam-shelling-out-big-bucks-for-government-jobs-gop-says-time-to-cut\/\" target=\"_blank\">six-figure salaries for the Interior Department&#8217;s Twitter monkey<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>The constant liberal assertion that the economic growth of the 1990s &#8212; coming on the heels of Bill Clinton&#8217;s tax increases &#8212; shows that taxes don&#8217;t effect the broader economy confuses correlation with causation and ignores the effects of NAFTA, the IT revolution, welfare reform, etc. In truth, the 90s likely boomed <em>less<\/em> than they would have without Clinton&#8217;s tax hikes, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.american.com\/archive\/2011\/august\/obamasfollytaxingtherich\/\" target=\"_blank\">something that the work of Obama&#8217;s own economic advisers suggests<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Liberals love to trot out the example of the internet as government innovation that works, but it&#8217;s worth noting that the internet wasn&#8217;t designed with commercial purposes in mind, but rather as a communications tool for the military. And, in fact, many of the lingering inefficiencies of the internet <a href=\"http:\/\/mises.org\/daily\/2211\" target=\"_blank\">stem from its government paternity<\/a>, and a whole host of the improvements that have been made to it owe to market forces.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>2012\u00a0 may be remembered as the year that Barack Obama dropped the mask. Based on his remarks at a campaign stop in Roanoke, Virginia on Friday, the president has no interest in making his peace with America&#8217;s entrepreneurs. In fact, his remarks there should make their blood run cold: \u00a0 We&#8217;ve heard this rap before. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[143,55,2975,3693,2544,2311,308],"class_list":["post-15121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-barack-obama","tag-capitalism","tag-elizabeth-warren","tag-entrepreneurs","tag-firefighters","tag-infrastructure","tag-internet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15121"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15121\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15128,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15121\/revisions\/15128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}