Turning things upside down

I've already written about Obama's "you didn't build that" comment in a post here.

Here at Extra Thoughts I want to bring out something I mentioned at W4 only in comments. One of the most trenchant points about what Obama said was made by Lawrence Auster:

Here, perhaps, is the ultimate sin of leftism in general and of Obama in particular: Obama treats the people who, through their efforts, have created wealth and all sorts of benefits to society, as though they were parasites. In short, he treats good as evil.

This is what we see the left doing elsewhere as well. According to the left, women can be men, men can be women, men can "marry" men, good, decent people are evil homophobes.  Criminals are good guys, and defenders of the innocent are scary gun-toters just waiting to kill somebody innocent. Probably you can think of some even better examples.


Obama is just continuing in that tradition. Instead of lauding the producers of wealth--indeed, the producers who also produce the tax money to fund various government programs--Obama treats them as being in need of a good talking to, a good chiding, to remind them that they are not really the producers, that "somebody else did that." And think how much better this producers-as-parasites meme makes people feel who actually aren't contributing anything of value to society. People like this fellow, perhaps. Ha! Those so-called "wealth creators" are the real parasites, so presumably professional panhandlers are...who knows...philosophers, the ones really giving something profound and important to us all. Or something like that. This is, of course, the philosophy of Occupy and of Communism. The "evil capitalists" are the parasites and the thieves, living off of everybody else. And "everybody else" needs to rise up and take it from them. 


More anon, including some quotes about cluelessness about where wealth comes from. I'm planning a post containing some bon mots (or is that "bons mot"?) from John C. Wright--a real character of a blogger if I've ever seen one. Sneak preview: Wright's post on the, shall we say, weaknesses of Chesterton's economics. Enjoy (if you're the kind of person to enjoy that kind of thing).