His statement does seem to have been an attempt to talk about raising taxes, so I guess he might have been trying to be substantive. That’s an important debate to be having and I hope that gets explored more in the Presidential campaign.
I agree that talking about Bain can be important, but not in the way that the Obama campaign has been doing it, with falsehoods, insinuations, and caricatures. And the pure ignorance of obsessing about when Romney left Bain, something which you would think the guy who oversees the SEC would know something about. If the President doesn’t know how SEC filings work, he needs to find out. He’s been on the job over three years now, it’s kind of important for him to know that.
Why the heck is this quote generating such controversy?
All Obama is saying is that we all, as Americans, stand on the shoulders of giants. Our individual efforts and outputs are made possible by the efforts and outputs of others, in turn.
I guess some people don’t like that reality, though.
There was a little more too it than that. He also strongly implied that hard work and intelligence don’t matter, it’s collectivism that helps us become successful. Therefore, we should pay more taxes.
This is a complete fabrication by the right wing media. Obama never said, or even implied that hard work and intelligence don’t matter. These are baldfaced lies by Romney surrogates and sycophants.
**I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something – there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.
**
He’s saying pretty clearly here that being smart and hard working isn’t what made successful people successful. Instead:
**If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.
**
The government was the difference?
Explain to me what the remarks actually mean if I’m wrong.
[QUOTE=President Obama]
The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.
[/QUOTE]
Now do you get it? Success comes from individual initiative and the positive business environment that the U.S. provides. It isn’t just one or the other, but a combination of both.
The government makes a difference, not the difference. Compare the U.S. to Somalia and where do you think an entrepreneur has a better chance of succeeding? There’s a reason why it was an American who built the Microsoft empire and not some equally bright, ambitious kid in a mud hut in Africa.
Then there was no need for him to minimize the impact of intelligence and hard work before all that. Yet he did.
Off the cuff, people say contradictory things all the time. You may choose to interpret his remarks favorably. Others might have a different view. All depends which contradictory statement you believe represents his real views.
As I read it, Obama is saying intelligence and hard work are necessary to success, and that other things are necessary, too. Lots of people are smart and work hard, but they don’t all become millionaires. There is a physical infrastructure (roads and bridges) that enables all forms of interaction and commerce, and a less tangible form of support (teachers) that provides the knowledge and inspiration that push people to excel.
Don’t read the opposite into that, however. All the best roads and bridges in the world won’t turn a lazy idiot into Steve Jobs. I don’t see anyone here saying that, least of all the president.
As to the purpose of the speech, some here have hinted at it. To take these things as givens is the first step to losing them. We must recognize their importance before we will put in the effort to maintain, improve, and surpass them. When, someday, we move beyond the internet and a message board like this is viewed as a quaint throwback, I hope it happens in the U.S. and that we enjoy the benefits of getting there first. But it won’t just happen if we don’t think it’s important.
None of which is to take any credit away from Steve Jobs or Michael Phelps. Praise is not a zero-sum game. I can recognize their extraordinary talents and still be realistic about the world in which they pursued their dreams.
As I told Magellan, there was no “minimizing” in the words quoted from Obama. To minimize is to make something as small (or make it seem as small) as possible. Simply lessening something by some factor is not to “minimize” it. If someone has an overinflated sense of their own contribution, then correcting them is the very opposite of “minimizing” their contribution. To minimize their contribution would be to say they contributed nothing of significance. Obama did not say that.
He’s saying that it’s a combination of hard work, intelligence, and the work of others. Had you been born in a poor, third-world country where bandits raid you at any moment’s notice, your business would simply not exist no matter how smart/hardworking you were.
There’s this sort of extreme right-wing talking point that all wealth you get is yours and yours alone because you-deserve-it and you worked hard/took risks for it all on your own. However, America is funded by tax dollars, which means your business is successful because it was allowed to grow within an infrastructure put up by everyone else over many years. This was Obama’s point.
Besides, there are good reasons to justify paying more taxes anyway when you consider that lowering taxes for the rich (supply-side argument) has not resulted in more jobs but has instead resulted in mass-wealth transfer. Right now we have firms touting record-high profits and cash-reserves with overseas operations and American job-cutting and low employment. There’s a serious demand problem right now and investment is low. Lowering taxes for the rich doesn’t solve this problem because we need to stimulate demand.
It’s contradictory only if you cherry-pick the right words out of context. Speaking of which, you didn’t explain why you omitted the line that I quoted from your post.
Lots of people are smart and work hard, but EVERYONE benefits from infrastructure, so his statement makes no sense. “your rare traits didn’t make you successful, the common things did.” Wha?
You know what actually makes people successful: Freedom. Peter Kirsanow, a National Review writer, told the story of his father, who fled the Soviet Union and came to the US and built a successful business here. In the Soviet Union he had education, health care, bridges, roads, fire departments, etc. So how come his brains and hard work got him ahead here and not there? What’s the primary difference?
Liberty. If the President had said that, he would have said something truly worthwhile.
I’ll see your two wrongs fallacy and raise you a “turnabout is fair play” and “as you judge, so shall you be judged”.
The President thinks using statements out of context to win elections is fair. He has a general philosophy that no candidate should disarm themselves when the other candidate is using a weapon. That’s how he justifies his Super PAC, and I agree with him. If Romney’s going to have one, he should have one. But if he considers taking words out of context to be a fair campaign tactic, then that means it is a fair campaign tactic for the Romney campaign.
[In case I have to explain my point, which I admit could be obscure here, we could come up with a long and expanding list of things that are present here in the US, but that just kind of proves the point, really. For instance, food and water are necessary to success, but people keep overlooking that! If you agree that Freedom is necessary to success, and that the individual cannot him or herself provide freedom (implicit in your anecdote) then you are supporting the notion that success in the US is dependent upon the things the US collectively provides.]
Where are you getting this from? No one is saying that these traits (intelligence and hard work) are not necessary for success; just that other things are necessary, too, and we neglect them at our peril. This has been pointed out to you many times.
Is this your way of admitting that people are taking Obama’s words out of context?
This is true, but here’s the bigger point which I never seem to get to.
Freedom is not expensive in terms of money. And neither is infrastructure really. While the President’s statements were intended as a condemnation of Randian individualism, the could also be considered a condemnation of the entitlement state. The budget goes mostly to entitlements these days and they are squeezing out other kinds of spending. Like the spending that helps business owners succeed.
