On July 17, 2012 the Business Insider said: Paul Ryan went on
an epic rant over Obama's comment about business. The Wisconsin Republican …absolutely
tore into the president in a chat I (James Pethokoukis, American Enterprise Institute) had
with him earlier today. Among the highlights:
“Every
now and then, President Obama pierces the veil. He’s usually pretty coy about
his ideology, but he lets the veil slip from time to time.” … His straw man
argument is this ridiculous caricature where he’s trying to say if you want any
security in life, you stick with me. If you go with these Republicans, they’re
going to feed you to the wolves because they believe in some Hobbesian state of
nature, and it’s one or the other which is complete bunk, absolutely
ridiculous. But it seems to be the only way he thinks he can make his case. He’s
deluded himself into thinking that his so-called enemies are these crazy
individualists who believe in some dog-eat-dog society when what he’s really
doing is basically attacking people like entrepreneurs and stacking up a list
of scapegoats to blame for his failures.” “The idea that these entrepreneurs
owe all their success to some government bureaucrat or some centralized planner
just defies reality.” How does building roads and bridges justify
Obamacare? If you like the GI Bill therefore we must go along with socialized
medicine. It’s a strange leap that he takes. … To me it’s the laziest form of a
debate to affix views to your opponent that they do not have so you can
demonize them and defeat them and win the debate by default. “His comments seem to derive from a
naive vision of a government-centered society and a government-directed
economy. It stems from an idea that the nucleus of society and the economy is
government not the people. … It is antithetical to the American idea. “We
believe in free communities and this is a statist attack on free communities.” “As
all of his big government spending programs fail to restore jobs and growth, he
seems to be retreating into a statist vision of government direction and
control of a free society that looks backward to the failed ideologies of the
20th century.” I think he
believes America was on the right path until Reagan came along and Reagan got
us going in the wrong direction. And, “He wants to be as
transformational as Reagan by undoing the entire Reagan revolution.”… I think he sees himself as bringing
about this wave of progressivism, and the only thing stopping him are these
meddling conservatives who believe in these founding principles so he has to
caricature them in the ugliest light possible to win the argument. This is not
a Bill Clinton Democrat. He’s got this very government-centric, old 20th
century collectivist philosophy which negates the American experiment which is
people living in communities, supporting one another, having government stick
to its limits so it can do its job really well …“Those of us who
are conservative believe in government, we just believe government has limits.
We want government to do what it does well and respect its limits so civil
society and families can flourish on their own and do well and achieve their
potential.”
I watched the 42:25 July 13 YouTube-SolelyByRequest video on
Obama’s speech in Roanoke, Virginia to hear for myself what was said. About 32
minutes into the video the President said – The government can’t solve every
problem. If people don’t want to be helped you can’t always help them. (33:40)
If you’ve been successful you didn’t get there on your own (34:00)…if you were
successful somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great
teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable
American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in
roads and bridges, if somebody’s got a business you didn’t build that…Somebody
else made that happen. The internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government
research created the internet so that all the companies could make money off
the internet. The point is when we succeed it’s because of our own individual
initiative and because we do things together. There’s some things like fighting
fires that we don’t do on our own. …So we say to ourselves ever since the
founding of this country, you know what, there are just some things we do
better together…That’s how we funded the GI bill, that’s how we created the
middle class, that’s how we built the Golden Gate Bridge and the Hoover Dam,
that’s how we invented the internet, that’s how we sent a man to the moon. We
rise or fall together as one nation and as one people… (35:30) Your not on your
own, we’re in this together… (35:50) How do we help working class people,
strivers, doers – how do we help them succeed, how do we make sure their hard
work pays off. (end: 36 minutes)
The
President said he was taken out of context. On May 15, I heard the President
say JPMorgan is one of the better managed banks but even if you’re smart you
can make mistakes which is why they passed Wall Street Reform – banks are
insured by the taxpayers and we don’t want them taking risks so they have to be
bailed out again – if we get the rules that were proposed/passed by Congress
implemented it shouldn’t happen again – there are still those fighting it; he
feels our banks should invest in small businesses and homeowners and not risky
investment deals. This doesn’t sound like a man who has no respect for
business. You should listen to the video yourself as I tend to agree with him.
In my opinion, no one makes it in business alone – they have employees, customers,
and even more people that support them; the government does give grants and do
research. I’ll tell you about the Reagan versus Clinton record tomorrow after I
go into Republican John Sununu’s comments.
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