KRAUTHAMMER:: Did the state make you great? – WaPo
By MB Snow at July 20, 2012 | 12:53 am | Print
By Charles Krauthammer –
“If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
— Barack Obama,
Roanoke, Va., July 13
And who might that somebody else be? Government, says Obama. It built the roads you drive on. It provided the teacher who inspired you. It “created the Internet.” It represents the embodiment of “we’re in this together” social solidarity that, in Obama’s view, is the essential origin of individual and national achievement.
To say that all individuals are embedded in and the product of society is banal. Obama rises above banality by means of fallacy: equating society with government, the collectivity with the state. Of course we are shaped by our milieu. But the most formative, most important influence on the individual is not government. It is civil society, those elements of the collectivity that lie outside government: family, neighborhood, church, Rotary club, PTA, the voluntary associations that Tocqueville understood to be the genius of America and source of its energy and freedom.
via Charles Krauthammer: Did the state make you great? – The Washington Post.
Barack Obama Charles Krauthammer Commentary Election 2012 Featured General Politics
