-By Gary Krasner
Obama’s “no one gets rich on their own” rant was to justify policies that soak the rich, and not about the wonders of roads & bridges! But that was how Obamians had tried to spin it, such as here at Huffington Post.
You can read my postscript deconstruction of his Roanoke speech at the end of this article to see how ridiculous that is. Bottom line is that when Obama uttered these two sentences, “If you’ve got a business—-you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen”, he was NOT referring to roads and bridges from the prior sentence. It would have been far too obvious for him to have meant that shop keepers do not build the roads and bridges in the towns where they operate. He sure as hell didn’t mean to suggest that their taxes help build them! No, holding to the full context of the speech, he meant that they are not singularly responsible for their success, that would warrant the degree of wealth they reaped.
The original thesis—-the product of liberal linguistics consultant George Lakoff—-is a way to minimize individual success, so as to justify taking from successful people the rewards of their success, through taxes. Liz Warren—-the women who couldn’t get into Harvard on her own without falsely claiming to have one drop of Cherokee blood—-had adopted this simplistic baloney to frame the debate for OWS, if you recall.
Here’s Lakoff:
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The ‘No One Gets Rich On Their Own’ Baloney”