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OBAMA’S AMERICA — AND OURS

By: Patrick J. Buchanan

“If
you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
Mitt Romney fell on this Obama quote like an NFL lineman on an end zone fumble
during the Super Bowl. And understandably so.

For this was no gaffe, said Romney, this
is what Obama believes. This is straight out of the catechism. Obama thinks
that had not the government created the preconditions, none of us could
succeed. We all depend on government. None of us can make it on our own.

Had Obama been channeling Isaac Newton —
“If I have seen further than others it is because I am standing on the
shoulders of giants” — or John Donne — “No man is an island, entire of itself”
— many would have nodded in agreement.

But what Obama seemed to be saying —
indeed, was saying — was that, without government, no business can succeed.

Realizing that statement rubs against a
deeply ingrained American belief — that the people built the nation — Obama and
his acolytes are charging that Romney ripped his words out of context.

Here is Obama’s full quote:

“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 it happen.”

Even with this preamble, Romney seems to
have it right. Obama sees government as indispensable. Without the roads and
bridges that government builds, without the teachers government provides, no
one succeeds. It takes a village.

Yet Obama’s narrative does not tell us why
some succeed and others fail. Does Obama understand America? For he surely does
not seem to understand her history as once taught to every schoolchild.

From Jamestown in 1607 to Yorktown in
1781, there was no federal government. There was no United States. Yet
generations of colonists had built forts, cleared lands, created farms,
established workshops. Americans fed, clothed and housed themselves, creating
one of the highest standards of living on earth for 3 million people.

How could the U.S. government have built
the roads and bridges if the U.S. government did not exist before 1789? There
were no public schools until the 19th century. Colleges were the creations of
religious denominations. The Pell grant had not yet been invented.

Was government indispensable to Eli
Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin, Robert Fulton’s invention of the steam
boat, Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone, Guglielmo Marconi’s
invention of the radio and Thomas Edison’s invention of the light bulb, and
just about everything else?

Did Wilbur and Orville Wright learn how to
build bicycles in a CETA program? Were the feds responsible for the flight at
Kitty Hawk?

Seeing government as antecedent to
enterprise, Obama has it backward. In America, individuals, families,
communities came first. Hardworking men and women built the society. Only after
that did they send their best and brightest off to the House of Burgesses to
discuss colonial issues.

The Founding Fathers who created the U.S.
government were deeply distrustful of the centralized power Obama seems to
worship. They had had enough of the beneficent big government of George III.
Obama notwithstanding, government does not create wealth. Government collects
wealth, redistributes wealth, consumes wealth.

Even when government “builds” something
like a Golden Gate Bridge, it does not really build it. It commissions it.
Architects, engineers and construction companies build the bridge, not
bureaucrats from HUD.

As Arthur Herman writes in “Freedom’s
Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War Two,” FDR
immediately turned to GM’s Big Bill Knudsen to corral the leaders of American
industry to stop making Fords, Packards, Lincolns and Chryslers, and start
making jeeps, tanks, guns and aircraft engines.

“Some people regard private enterprise as
a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not
enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon,” said Winston
Churchill.

Obama belongs to category two.

But perhaps he cannot be blamed for not
understanding the real America. His mother and father, his role models like
Frank Marshall Davis and Saul Alinsky, his neighbors like Bernardine Dohrn and
Bill Ayers, all came out of the anti-capitalist left.

From academia to community organizing to
an Illinois legislature that milked so much money from the people the state may
beat Jerry Brown’s California into bankruptcy — Obama’s life has been spent in
tax-exempt, tax-subsidized and tax-supported institutions.

Yet this Obama-Romney collision frames the
great issue of 2012.

Which is the true creator of wealth and
engine of prosperity?

Is it, as Obama believes, government?

Or is it, as Romney believes, people and
their institutions and businesses that, though carrying the immense burden of
government that consumes 37 percent of the economy, still employs six of seven
Americans still working? That’s the choice.