The meaning of Roanoke

LITTLE ROCK — Much has been made of President Barack Obama’s “You didn’t build that” comments in Roanoke, Va. Obama supporters have, of course, defended his statement and pointed out that those particular words were just a small part of a larger defense of the easy-to-defend proposition that government is important.

Cutting the president some slack seems reasonable at first glance here; there is, after all, something repugnant about the media’s growing “gotcha” tendency to jump on any remotely questionable utterance amid the thousands of such utterances that political leaders deliver in a given week. Whatever else we can say, we can almost certainly say that Obama didn’t mean to give the slap in the face to American business owners that his comments suggest. That would hardly be smart politics.

Still, such qualifications miss something, even when taking Obama’s entire speech into account. More to the point, his comments struck a chord precisely because they seem so consistent with the thinking of his administration when it comes to the sources of wealth creation and the role of government in a free society.

Obama’s speech is important because it so concisely reflects his belief that pretty much everything begins and ends with government. In this, Obama makes the all-too-common mistake among liberals of conflating society and government and assuming that the latter should dictate to, organize and dominate the former. For Obama, government isn’t merely the servant of a free people, performing necessary tasks and providing necessary public goods (including infrastructure and security), it is the center of our lives, the creator of our wealth, and the wheel to which all of us as spokes are attached.

There are several problems with such a conception (apart from its vaguely totalitarian odor and corresponding denigration of “civil society”), first of which is that the government cannot “create” wealth because everything government spends comes from those who do, otherwise known as taxpayers. When Obama points out all the things government does for us to make the point that we don’t achieve anything entirely on our own, he forgets that high achievers, most conspicuously successful businessmen and entrepreneurs, disproportionately pay for all those things.

More relevant than the idea that we can’t succeed without government is the idea that government can’t do anything at all without the private sector; in terms of causal relationships, government is the dependent-not the independent-variable. It is created by the people, it doesn’t create them.

Someone might also wish to tap Obama on the shoulder and let him know that perpetual battle with straw men ultimately undermines his credibility. Last time I looked, there were no Republicans or pundits on the political right who were denying the necessity of government; rather, what they were complaining about was excessive, always-expanding government of the kind Obama and the left seem to demand.

Such an admonition might also include a reminder that the ability of government to perform its most basic functions, including building roads and bridges and schools and other forms of necessary infrastructure, is actually impaired when it attempts to do too many other things. The more money the welfare state consumes, and the more precarious our fiscal condition becomes with that increasing consumption, the less money there is to build the kind of things Obama identifies as “public goods.” Even worse than an inappropriate vision of government, then, is an inappropriate vision which contradicts itself on its own terms.

Finally, Obama and other liberals should certainly take greater care, lest they be misunderstood, when talking about the relationship between government and taxation. Obama frequently uses the term “spending” when denouncing “tax cuts for the rich,” as if allowing the rich (or anybody, for that matter) to keep more of the money they have earned somehow represents governmental expenditure. Only people who think that all wealth belongs first to the state would use such language. The implicit assumption of such thinking is that we should be grateful for whatever government allows us to keep, and that it is our betters like Obama who get to decide how much that is, with any resistance on our part dismissed as an ungrateful refusal to “give back” to those who made our success possible.

Within this context, it is particularly amusing to watch Obama sycophants redefine the traditional American belief in limited government (which obviously includes limited taxation) as little more than a Republican scheme to protect rich people from the taxman. By such logic, one could redefine the American founding itself as nothing but a mean-spirited conspiracy of greedy plutocrats.

The larger problem for Obama in all of this is in the possibility that voters might begin to connect the dots and suspect a cause-and-effect relationship between our dismal economic recovery and a president who has no life experience with, apparently scant understanding of, and perhaps even a visceral distaste for business and the private sector. In short, that they might begin to suspect, if they haven’t already, that he is very much the wrong man for the job.

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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.