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Elizabeth Warren: All your business are belong to us.

By: Tabitha Hale (Diary)  |  September 22nd, 2011 at 12:16 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

Elizabeth Warren. She’s running against (and by some polls, is ahead of) Scott Brown in the Massachusetts Senate race. 

This week, Warren made a statement that is terrifying and, well, just wrong. First, watch the clip.

That’s right. According to Warren, there are no “self made men.” No one has actually earned his fortune on his own because the government made it all possible. In other words, successful entrepreneurs are not justified in claiming credit for their own work, because other people pay taxes. Or something.

This gets to the very core of the leftist belief that people are not capable of succeeding on their own, and therefore must rely on  the government, or society at large, for their success. No man is truly responsible for his own success and is therefore not responsible for his own failure.

With few exceptions, business owners and employees pay their share of taxes. They live in this country and contribute to the economy, and there is a resulting expectation that the government will do its job as well. This country was founded upon the idea that people can acheive through hard work and dedication. If an entrepreneur starts a successful business, he should be free to reap the rewards of his investment and work. The role of our government – a government designed to be for the people, by the people – should be to stay out of the way and empower its citizens to innovate and succeed.

The government doesn’t get to reap the rewards of its citizens’ work because it is doing what citizens pay them to do. The government exists to protect its people and to serve them. It is not the other way around.

The idea that one man’s achievement belongs to everyone should be deeply troubling to Americans. The reason bailouts were so troubling is that most Americans believe that success and failure belong to the individual, the business involved – not the collective. If the community owns the success of every millionaire, it also owns every failure. That is the very antithesis of free-market, and American, principle.

COMMENTS

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  • bk

    Then again, Kelo made it clear that no one actually owns property – the state may let them occupy it as long as the state finds it convenient.

    • http://www4.webng.com/rickbull/lostlucky/ rickbull

      is that it created a giant vacant lot owned by New London, CT which currently generates ZERO revenue for the city and county.

      Sometimes there is justice in the Universe.

      Thank you, Scott Bullock, for trying to protect our property rights.

  • acat

    Seriously considered getting a picture of this, and of the Muslim center right next to Planned Parenthood but .. in both cases, the traffic was heavy and this cat is not a photo-blogger like zombie (some content NSFW) who would do it much better.

    The premise is silly – a job is *not* a right – but it’s this kind of “big lie” that moves the left, and their ability to keep telling it is moving the country leftward.

    Warren appears, here, to be making the same case, although she chooses to not state the silly, that she believes it is quite apparent.

    Brown must counter-punch this .. hard.

    Mew

    • http://www4.webng.com/rickbull/lostlucky/ rickbull

      • acat

        Not sure it’s the same one, or even the same city, but .. that looks like it.

        It’s still just incredibly stupid.

        Mew

        • http://www4.webng.com/rickbull/lostlucky/ rickbull

          It’s like saying that health care is a right. How can you make the services of another person a right without considering that person to be a slave? How can you walk into another man’s business and tell him that he has to give you a job because you have a right to that job?

          Liberalism is the retardation of intellectual maturity, said maturity ending somewhere around the age of 5.

          • acat

            Those who have never seen a measles or polio epidemic reject the vaccinations that keep them from happening.

            Those who have never seen slavery up close reject the laws and unwritten rules of conduct that let free people stay free.

            Just a thought.

            Mew

      • Doc Holliday

        .

  • billyd

    Is she honestly nuts? Aren’t roads supposed to be financed through the tax on gasoline? Thus everyone that uses the roads pays for them? And if you really want to go down that path, and try to say that the manufacturer owes something because he is able to bring his goods to locations the consumer can buy them, what would happen if the manufacturer decided not to bring them to the consumer, but rather the consumer needed to go to the manufacturer. Imagine that if you wanted a steak and potatoes, you would need to get to the farm to get them, rather than the supermarket.

    I honestly don’t understand the liberal mindset at all. For some reason they seem to think that they are forced to buy goods and services from a particular person or company. If you think your banker is making too much money, the idea of using a different banker never seems to enter their train of thought.

    The idea that people actually cheer this nonsense is quite disturbing.

    • funwithknives

      statements in The People’s Republic of Massachusetts. In the recent History Channel series “How the States Got Their Shapes”, it was noted that Maine-ers have a term for Mass. visitors and summer vacationers. The reference is: “Mass-Holes”, and it seemed it did not take much prompting to get Maine-ers to state this realism.
      One downside is now I cannot hear a Mass. accent without chortling. [I'm a BAD,BAD Boy] Is this what being a racist is kinda like?

    • http://www4.webng.com/rickbull/lostlucky/ rickbull

      What if the entrepreneur is a man who owns a company that — wait for it — paves roads!!!!????

      I think I just heard several hundred liberal trolls’ heads explode . . .

  • JSobieski

    Using tax payers who pay 5% of the bill as financially equivalent to those who 95% of the bill is flawed reasoning.

    Warren has it back-asswards.

    Those wealthy factory owners out there pay the roads that other people drive on.

    • http://www4.webng.com/rickbull/lostlucky/ rickbull

      of his employees who, in turn, pay taxes on those salaries.

      Warren is the classic snake eating its own tail. Very soon, she will have completely consumed herself and we’ll be done with her.

  • aesthete

    To them, wealth is already extant and Father Government is setting everyone’s allowance.

    In reality, the entrepreneur creates wealth through his activities, which pays for government.

    • JSobieski

      We didn’t have such things until the country had rich people. Other countries don’t have those things because they never respected property rights, which means only thugs and royalty can become rich.

      • Common_Cents

        trickle up poverty to equalize everyone, well, except the liberal elite who now what’s best for the rest of us.

    • http://www4.webng.com/rickbull/lostlucky/ rickbull

      nt..

  • Repair_Man_Jack

    This will kill anyone’s desire to strike out there for the grat beyond and take entrepreneurial risk.

  • keysconservative

    What about Wall Street investors? Don’t they make money off the backs of everybody else? How about taxing them at a higher rate on their winnings?
    What about teachers? Didn’t they benefit from a publicly funded education? Don’t they work in a publicly funded facility? Aren’t they succeeding on the backs of ”the working class”?
    And what about babies? Aren’t they born in hospitals built and manned by others? Aren’t their diapers manufactured by others? Isn’t the formula they eat, the baby powder that keeps them dry and the shampoo that doesn’t burn their little eyes transported on public roads? Tax the infants!!!

    • funwithknives

      nt

  • rightwingmom52

    without the government. How do they get this dribble out to their rank and file so quickly? The following was posted on the Facebook page of my parent’s rep in TN.

    In order to succeed, millionaires used the things that taxes pay for such as roads, the courts system (to enforce contracts), police protection, government-funded research and development, an educated workforce, the internet, and lots of ot…her things. They could not make money without these taxpayer-funded services. They are not being punished for success, they are paying for what made them successful. I have never met anyone who would rather make 30,000/yr over 3,000,000/yr just to avoid paying taxes. No one resents these people for being successful. I am happy that there are people who go out and start businesses. But, I don’t think people are going to stop succeeding just to avoid taxes.

    [name removed], you’re right. Their money isn’t ours, but they wouldn’t have made that money in the first place without what we and they paid for: research, roads, education, infrastructure, legal system, clean air & water, etc. etc. etc. The sale…s taxes hit the poor hard. A rich person and a poor person eat about the same. So the impact on the poor is disproportionately higher. Plus, the more money the poor and middle class have in their pockets, they more they can spend to keep these businesses afloat. When the working and middle class have money in their pockets, it get circulated in the economy, while the wealthy and corporations put their money in bank accounts in Switzerland and Bermuda and it doesn’t get circulated in the economy. You can’t blame them for socking away their money in bank accts. bc there is a limit to how much one family can spend. Naturally, they will sock it away.

    One small example, Most of our web-based businesses such as eBay or Amazon are a direct result of what the U.S. military invested in developing the internet. Without public schools, their customers wouldn’t be able to read their websites. etc. etc.

    I edited out the names for this comment. Of course, I responded by linking to a couple of redstate articles and one from Heritage plus my own comments.

  • earlgrey

    I see this appealing to union workers and lazy people, but Americans have always enjoyed the abilitly to have ownership over their efforts, this argument takes that away.

    How many small businesses wiill she attract with these ideas?

    • http://www4.webng.com/rickbull/lostlucky/ rickbull

      She’s vying to be a senator, not the governor. Don’t you know? Governors are responsible to bring jobs into the state. Senators go to Washington to get taxpayers’ booty for their state. Senators (at least the liberal ones) don’t care if their constituents have jobs, so long as they have other people’s money to burn.

  • qsclues

    Warren is almost on to something, but much like an “almost perfect” bowling throw leads to a 7-10 split, so does Warren err.

    The basic sentiment: The private sector and government need to have a symbiotic relationship, not a parasitic one. This notion is laudable.

    Why people of her ilk will never be able to fix the problem: She doesn’t realize that the private sector is the host and government is the parasite, not the other way around.

  • http://www.usdebateboard.com usdebateboard

    I guess we should extrapolate what she said to mean that she thought the unwashed masses were entitled to a big new wave of credit, whether they deserved it or not, since the banks were obligated to “pay it forward” and it was the government’s to decide who got it anyway.

  • Common_Cents

    Why not ask why DEMs don’t go for a 50/hr minimum wage? Wouldn’t that be great that everyone made a min of 50 bucks an hour? It could be done by a vote and stroke of a pen. Make them tell us why it wouldn’t work.

  • kowalski

    Mainstream in the law school I used to work for. She’s middle of the road!

    Nothing is shocking ;) .

    • kowalski

      The fact that she actually says “God Bless” when talking about someone who “Builds a factory and is successful” makes her actually a little *right* of center at a lot of law schools around the country. Frankly I fear for her tenure at Harvard after saying something like that. Gaaaaawd knows nobody I used to work for would have said that in front of a camera.

      • kowalski

        Now tha that a Harvard Law professor has used it in a backhandedly-charitable kind of way, I guess it’ll give a lot of license to law professors across the fruited plain to start using “God Bless” as something other than Fighting Words.

  • samudaef

    Once upon a time, there was a European country facing severe financial turmoil. And a political opportunist in this country made himself out to be the savior.

    He found a slice of society on which he could blame all of the country’s economic woes. And he got his political associates to foment hatred against that slice of society. Over time, a majority of the rest of the countrymen followed suit.

    The savior then, supported by widespread hatred of that slice of society, stripped the hated countrymen of their private property ownership rights. The political savior said that it was only fair to do this in revenge for all of the problems that those hated countrymen purportedly had caused. Meanwhile, he stripped the remaining countrymen of a myriad of personal freedoms. And he stripped the heretofore free press of its freedom of speech.

    In due time, this political savior turned his country into a police state where he and his political cohorts enjoyed unassailable power over the masses. Soon, there was no way to oppose the savior or to depose him from office. Political opposition was destroyed. Soon, no one dared speak against him for fear of arrest and imprisonment.

    He then led his country on a murderous rampage throughout Europe. We know the rest of that story.

    Have we forgotten the 1930s already? Today, Obama wants to enrage common Americans against the “rich”. He’s directly attacking their right to private property ownership.

    What’s with our collective amnesia?!