Thomas Sowell's Response to Barack Obama's "You didn't build that!"

The
perseverance of Thomas Edison, as he tried scores of materials before
finally trying tungsten as the filament of the light bulb he was
inventing; the dedication of Abraham Lincoln as he studied law on his
own while struggling to make a living -- these were things young people
were taught to admire, even if they had no intention of becoming
inventors or lawyers, much less President of the United States.

Somewhere
along the way, all that changed. Today, the very concept of achievement
is de-emphasized and sometimes attacked. Following in the footsteps of
Barack Obama, Professor Elizabeth Warren of Harvard has made the
downgrading of high achievers the centerpiece of her election campaign
against Senator Scott Brown.

To cheering audiences, Professor
Warren says, "there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own.
Nobody. You build a factory out there, good for you, but I want to be
clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid
for. You hired workers that the rest of us paid to educate."

Do
the people who cheer this kind of talk bother to stop and think through
what she is saying? Or is heady rhetoric enough for them?

People
who run businesses are benefiting from things paid for by others? Since
when are people in business, or high-income earners in general, exempt
from paying taxes like everybody else?

At a time when a small
fraction of high-income taxpayers pay the vast majority of all the taxes
collected, it is sheer chutzpah to depict high-income earners as
somehow being subsidized by "the rest of us," whether in paying for the
building of roads or the educating of the young.

Since everybody
else uses the roads and the schools, why should high achievers be
expected to feel like free loaders who owe still more to the government,
because schools and roads are among the things that facilitate their
work? According to Elizabeth Warren, because it is part of an
"underlying social contract."

Conjuring up some mythical agreement
that nobody saw, much less signed, is an old ploy on the left -- one
that goes back at least a century, when Herbert Croly, the first editor
of The New Republic magazine, wrote a book titled "The Promise of
American Life."

Whatever policy Herbert Croly happened to favor
was magically transformed by rhetoric into a "promise" that American
society was supposed to have made -- and, implicitly, that American
taxpayers should be forced to pay for. This pious hokum was so
successful politically that all sorts of "social contracts" began to
appear magically in the rhetoric of the left.

If talking in this
mystical way is enough to get you control of billions of dollars of the
taxpayers' hard-earned money, why not?

Certainly someone who
claimed to be part Indian, as Elizabeth Warren did when applying for
academic appointments in an affirmative action environment, is unlikely
to be squeamish about using imaginative words during a political
election campaign.

Sadly, this kind of cute use of words is not
confined to one political candidate or to this election year. The very
concept of achievement is a threat to the vision of the left, and has
long been attacked by those on the left.

People who succeed --
whether in business or anywhere else -- are often said to be
"privileged," even if they started out poor and worked their way up the
hard way.

Outcome differences are called "class" differences. Thus
when two white women, who came from families in very similar social and
economic circumstances, made different decisions and got different
results, this was the basis for a front-page story titled "Two Classes,
Divided by 'I Do'" in the July 15th issue of the N.Y Times. Personal
responsibility, whether for achievement or failure, is a threat to the
whole vision of the left, and a threat the left goes all-out to combat,
using rhetoric uninhibited by reality.

Thomas Sowell