Putative President Barack H. Obama gave a speech in Roanoke, Virginia last Saturday. Had he stayed with his usual banal content, no one would have written home about it. Maybe “nobody writing home about him” made him desperate. Desperate enough to show his true political philosophy. CNAV has long suspected that Obama seeks to promote worship of the collective and the state. Last Saturday in Roanoke, he proved that beyond a reasonable doubt. No matter what he says from now on, he cannot deny it anymore.

What Obama said

Todd Starnes, at Fox News, took down and reported every word Obama said. He started with his stock-in-trade: shout-outs to State and local Democrats, flat jokes about the campaign (and campaign ads), and beaming when members of his audience blurted how much they “love” him. Then he spun a tale about his American ancestors doing what they did only because they had help from the government. No one noticed anything unusual at first. When he repeated his tired lines like:

We tried this.  We tried this in the last decade and it did not work.

And:

I’ve got a different view.  I believe that the way you grow the economy is from the middle out.  I believe that you grow the economy from the bottom up.

No one but his usual hand-picked listeners paid attention. Why should they? He merely repeated himself. (He also told a falsehood: we did not try freedom or capitalism. Had George W. Bush put a real freedom plan in place, the collapse of 2008 need never have happened. But that’s another story.)

But when Obama said this next part, he didn’t repeat himself:

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.  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.

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 point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.  There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own.  I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service.  That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.

Why Obama is wrong

Barack H. Obama. Photo: Pete Souza, January 13, 2009

Obama forgets, if he ever knew, that successful people do what they do with the voluntary consent of every person with whom they deal. That includes the voluntary consent of those who hire him when he starts, the voluntary consent of those who work for him today, and the voluntary consent of any people who buy his product or service.

The examples that Obama gave, in the only world that he knows, are government services. (And some of them are not always government services at that.) He cites teachers, road builders, bridge builders, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that gave us what became the Internet.

But not all school are public schools even today. (Nor need any public school exist.) Streets and roads were not always public even in America.

As to the Internet: the Department of Defense needed to have its computers keep talking to one another even after a devastating attack from the air or from space. They developed a new networking method that civilians could use just as easily. The Internet is a by-product of one of the three proper functions of government, and grew out of the government’s basic mission. That mission is to manage force and to apply it to protect people’s rights.

Furthermore, when a person sets out to start a business, he, or someone close to him, has already paid the teacher, the road and bridge builder, and the technicians at DARPA who built the Internet. And anything else that the government “gave” the people, whether as a proper function of government or not.

Obama’s treatment of fire fighting has two basic flaws. First, Obama would have people believe that everything the government now does, the private economy could never do. Second, he ignores this fundamental fact about fire fighting. Every person already does keep his own fire service, if he owns, controls, or manages a large enough piece of property that could catch fire. Even an ordinary householder follows a few elementary fire safety rules. (Or he should.) If every householder had a fire extinguisher, and knew how to use it, that might stop a lot of fires from even starting. Any building of any size, definitely has a way to fight fires. True, fire fighting does not rely completely on one person’s effort to stop a fire before it starts, or put it out before it spreads. But neither do most people in a community do nothing to stop fires from starting, or to bring fires under control when they start. Otherwise, a city might burn in the ultimate Cloward-Piven disaster. Call it “The Heat of the Tinderboxes: Toward a Total Managed Community.”

What Obama wants

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov/Lenin, in a propaganda poster from his last days.

And that, of course, is what Obama wants. That is what Obama wants us to want. That is the only reason why he would say anything like what he said. Obama did more than insult owners of small businesses, as Todd Starnes said he did. Obama blanked them out completely. In the Obama world, no one can succeed unless the government wants him to succeed.

Of course, that can only encourage people not to try to succeed. After all, they didn’t have enough “help,” and it’s not their fault. And if success has no glory, then failure can have no blame. The result is a society of failures, and a failed society. And that would be exactly what Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven proposed on that May day in 1965. To return to the fire fighting metaphor: Obama hasn’t merely neglected the country’s economy. He has committed arson against it. Arson by omission, so that the poor can “weigh down” our society and usher in the total command economy that Obama has always wanted.

Obama’s campaign slogan is one word: Forward. But Communist and other leftist parties have often called themselves that. For that matter, his health care reform bill copied a Soviet health care plan. Behold, then, Obama’s greatest mentor: V. I. Lenin. ARVE Error: need id and provider
ARVE Error: need id and provider

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