The Meaning of Built

 

  What does it mean as to who built America?

 

  When someone builds a structure was it the lumber mill that built the building?  Of course not.   It is about a chain of support and enablers and transactions.  It is not as Obama and Warren emphasized a result of the collective.  Most things are built or created against the risk motives of the collective.  

 

The video at right is Elizabeth's Warren diatribe against individualism and for the power of the collective. 

 

Her statements about what has caused the deficit can only be responded to by the simplicity that the government spent that money without a gun to its head.

From WSJ :  Obama off the telestrator  raised some points about who is responsible for success.   As the writer below put it, we are not raised by wolves, but if we had they should receive some credit. 

 

 However the key element in any success is hard work, creativity, meeting a demand ahead of others, and gathering the right people and investments to make it happen.   None of these steps are assisted currently by the government, and in fact in the current environment they are all attenuated by the government.     

 

The video at right gives a reaction from Ron Paul to Warren's statement that social goods were necessary for any success.  His response to catalog her views as collective ownership or socialism is with merit.

 

 

 

To Obama’s comment on the government being critical to the formation of the internet, Tuccille writes: Link

 

As for the Internet ... Are we still humoring people who pretend that the modern Internet, with multimedia browsers, world-spanning commercial opportunities and unparalleled opportunities for free expression is a triumph of government planning? Government might have created standards for connecting computers from different organizations, but, as Robert David Graham of Errata Security writes:

 

What’s important about the Internet is that the OSI standard failed. It’s not the standard of today’s Internet. The government backed the wrong horse, so to speak. Instead, today’s Internet is based on TCP/IP -- a networking standard the government tried to kill off.

 

Most people concede that government played a major role, but as a participant in something that was happening anyway. Some commenters, such as Peter G. Klein, argue that the government's early involvement pushed the evolution of the technology behind the Internet in unfortunate directions. What's clear, though, is that what we value about the Internet, such as streaming video, vast quantities of free porn, easy shopping, sharing of data and the like are private developments by innovators and entrepreneurs.

 

True, it could be said to any of the entrepreneurs who built innovation upon innovation, "you didn’t get there on your own." But that could be said of anybody who wasn't raised by wolves, though even then, the wild doggies deserve their due. That's because healthy societies are the result of voluntary, collaborative efforts that build on what has already been developed. People enrich themselves and others by cutting deals with others or by picking up the baton from those who have gone before — that doesn't entail some formless, endless obligation to the collective, embodied, of course, by the nearest politicians with their hands out.

 

"You’re not on your own, we’re in this together," says Obama. Well ... Sort of. We all work at things that complement each other, simply because we won't get rewarded if nobody has any need for what we're doing. To the extent that government officials manage to properly perform jobs involving the maintenance of infrastructure that other people use while keeping the bridges to nowhere to a minimum ... That's great! They paved the roads without screwing up! But they get paid for that, just like the phone company and the gas company, and Sprint doesn't constantly insist we kiss its executives' asses because our phones work from day to day.

 

There's something deeply disturbing in the world-view of those who would minimize the achievements of those who pursued the ideas, took the risks, invested the time and money and made things happen. And it's no more encouraging to hear such people claim individual achievements as the property of the amorphous collective led, always, by themselves. The only value in such pronouncements is the warning they offer to those of us who seek something with a bit more promise for anybody with a hint of self-respect and a whisper of inspiration.

 

Having lived through the era when the internet first took shape, the above rings true.   I also saw a tremendous amount of money being spent on defense contracts that are now being argued as critical to the success of networking.  But what I also saw was a professor who came very early to design a terminal that connected to a network.  He later started a company named after him, Culler, that was huge in driving the concepts forward.  

 

It was about entrepreneurship then as it is now.   All else might enable, but is not the reason they are successful. 

 

Comments

Why is this collective position so embraced by the liberals?