Comrade Obama's Doxology: Praise the State, Ungrateful Individualist Heathen!

Comrade Obama's Doxology: Praise the State, Ungrateful Individualist Heathen!

Addressing a partisan crowd during a campaign stop in Roanoke, Virginia, President Obama hymned the praises of government as the provider of all good things, while rebuking business owners for their supposedly misplaced belief that they “build” wealth as individuals:

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.

In Obama’s collectivist reading of U.S. history, it was through
government intervention — not individual initiative — that “we created
the middle class.”

“We rise or fall together as one nation and as one people,” he insisted. “You’re not on your own, we’re in this together.”

Like most people of his ideological bent, Obama either cannot or will not distinguish between society — which is created through peaceful commerce and other forms of private cooperation — and the state
— an anti-social artifact built on conquest, coercion, and confiscation
of wealth. Government produces nothing; it is an exercise in pure
consumption and, usually, the destruction of capital. As Nietzsche
famously said, everything the State has is stolen.

Barack Obama — whose brow has never been moistened by the sweat of
honest labor — knows literally nothing about creating wealth and value.
As a politician, however, Obama is deeply committed to “community
organizing” — that is, the creation of government-focused coalitions
devoted to the forcible redistribution of the wealth that is created
through the exertions of private producers.

Speaking as a state legislator in a 2001 radio interview,
Obama distinguished between his variety of “community organizing” and
the work of civil rights activists in the 1950s and 1960s. The earlier
efforts, he pointed out approvingly, sought to overcome the "negative"
concept of liberties — that is, freedom from state control and
protection against abusive of individual rights by government agents —
but was too wedded to the idea of pursuing its social revolution through
the courts.

As Obama pointed out, "the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth,
and the more basic issues of political and economic justice in this
society.... [O]ne of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights
movement was, because the civil rights movement became so court-focused,
I think there was a tendency to lose track of the community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which to bring about redistributive change. And in some ways we still suffer from that.” (Emphasis added.)

As a paladin of the parasite class, Obama characterizes his tax
policies as a matter of “ask[ing] for the wealthy to pay a little bit
more” — as if an official demand backed by armed government agents were
akin to Oliver Twist’s plaintive request for a second helping of porridge, and that the shake-down needed to fund Washington’s redistributive designs would only apply to the “wealthy.”