During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama’s slogan was
“Yes, we can!” But if you thought that was an inspiring call for
individual empowerment, think again. His new message is, “Oh no,
you didn’t.”
On Friday, the president laid bare the logic behind his call for
higher taxes on the wealthy. “You know, there are a lot of wealthy,
successful Americans who agree with me, because they want to give
something back,” Obama said in a campaign speech. “They know they
didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on
your own. You didn’t get there on your own.”
“I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because
I was just so smart,” Obama continued. (He is apparently not struck
by people who think they can centrally plan the economy or wield
substantial political power over others because they are just so
smart.) “There are a lot of smart people out there.”
Having dismissed the old noggin as a possible explanation of
individual success, Obama next started in on hard work. “It must be
because I worked harder than everybody else,” he imagined the
winners of life’s lottery to believe. “Let me tell you something —
there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.”
Okay, people don’t succeed because of their inherent brain power
or hard work. By now the audience must have been sitting on the
edge of their seats, wondering how dear leader would explain
success. Obama finally obliged: “If you were successful, somebody
along the line gave you some help.”
In one particularly unfortunate line, Obama said, “If you’ve got
a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that
happen.” Just like he’s going to raise somebody else’s taxes, not
yours.
Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic candidate for Senate in
Massachusetts, made similar comments a
few months back: “There is nobody in this country who got rich on
his own. Nobody.” The speech — which in turn echoes Obama’s
comments that the rising debt is due to the Bush tax cuts, wars,
and the Medicare prescription drug benefit (policies the current
president mostly kept in place) — was wildly popular in
progressive circles.
On one level, Obama and Warren are obviously right. No man is an
island. People benefit from growing up in strong families or having
good teachers. People can be fortunate in the friends and relatives
who come into their lives, in the doors of opportunities that open
before them. Life isn’t always fair. Sometimes good people have bad
luck; the opposite is also true.
Does anybody really dispute this? Even many libertarians
understand we are not atomistic individuals but social creatures.
As George Constanza once reminded his Seinfeld co-star,
“We live in a society, Jerry.” To the extent that we are talking
about government, no serious person is advocating the end of
military, police or fire protection. We all benefit from not having
the country overrun by foreign attackers.
A 35 percent top marginal tax rate and a premium support model
for Medicare isn’t the stuff of anarchy. A gradual reduction in the
debt-to-GDP ratio over a period of decades isn’t some radical
rejection of the social contract.
Yet on another level, the president’s little lesson is
self-evidently absurd. Lots of people attend public schools and
have teachers. Very few people become Steve Jobs or Bill Gates.
Everybody uses the roads and bridges the factory owner uses to
bring his products to market. But not everyone builds a
factory.
The tax dollars that paid for those roads, bridges, schools, and
teachers didn’t just come from “someone else” or the “rest of us.”
They came from the innovators, the factory owners, and the
entrepreneurs too. In 2009, the top 400 taxpayers paid almost as
much in federal income taxes as the entire bottom 50 percent
combined.
The jobs created and the wages paid by those business owners
fueled a lot of the tax payments made by “someone else” and the
“rest of us.” The taxes imposed on those business owners could help
entice them to ship jobs overseas.
Barney Frank is often quoted as saying, “Government is simply
the name we give to the things we choose to do together.” But we do
lots of things together apart from government, in families and
communities, churches and synagogues, private associations and what
Edmund Burke called the “little platoons” of civil society.
The market itself is something we do together. Pace
Obama, the market found uses for the Internet that far exceeded
anything anticipated by the early government designers. Beyond Al
Gore’s wildest dreams, is the inconvenient truth. And when the
government acts outside of its constitutionally enumerated powers,
it may be doing things that none of us freely chose to do
together.
Just because government built the Hoover Dam doesn’t mean we
should celebrate when government blocks the Keystone Pipeline. Just
because tax revenues support valuable infrastructure and public
safety doesn’t mean excessive tax rates can’t kill jobs.
By all means, thank your mother or father, a teacher or soldier,
a friend or supportive group for contributing to your success.
Thank even your lucky stars, if you don’t want to cling bitterly to
religion and thank Someone Else. But don’t belittle personal
achievement.
“The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of
our individual initiative, but also because we do things together,”
Obama conceded. When the president says, “Yes, we can,” it may be
worthwhile to ask: “What do you mean ‘we,’ kemosabe?”
