July 20, 2012

THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR
Trashing Achievements
by Thomas Sowell
July 20, 2012

There was a time, within living memory, when the achievements of others were not only admired but were often taken as an inspiration for imitation of the same qualities that had served these achievers well, even if we were not in the same field of endeavor and were not expecting to achieve on the same scale.

The perseverance of Thomas Edison, as he tried scores of materials for the filament of the light bulb he was inventing; the dedication of Abraham Lincoln as he studied law on his own while struggling to make a living -- these were things young people were taught to admire, even if they had no intention of becoming inventors or lawyers, much less President of the United States.

Somewhere along the way, all that changed. Today, the very concept of achievement is de-emphasized and sometimes attacked. Following in the footsteps of Barack Obama, Professor Elizabeth Warren of Harvard has made the downgrading of high achievers the centerpiece of her election campaign against Senator Scott Brown.

To cheering audiences, Professor Warren says, "there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You build a factory out there, good for you, but I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers that the rest of us paid to educate."

Do the people who cheer this kind of talk bother to stop and think through what she is saying? Or is heady rhetoric enough for them?

People who run businesses are benefitting from things paid for by others? Since when are people in business, or high-income earners in general, exempt from paying taxes like everybody else?

At a time when a small fraction of high-income taxpayers pay the vast majority of all the taxes collected, it is sheer chutzpah to depict high-income earners as somehow being subsidized by "the rest of us," whether in paying for the building of roads or the educating of the young.

Read more: http://Spectator.org

HUMAN EVENTS

Did the State Make You Great?

by Charles Krauthammer

July 20, 2012

“If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
 – Barack Obama, Roanoke, Va., July 13

WASHINGTON — And who might that somebody else be? Government, says Obama. It built the roads you drive on. It provided the teacher who inspired you. It “created the Internet.” It represents the embodiment of “we’re in this together” social solidarity that, in Obama’s view, is the essential origin of individual and national achievement.

To say all individuals are embedded in and the product of society is banal. Obama rises above banality by means of fallacy: equating society with government, the collectivity with the state. Of course we are shaped by our milieu. But the most formative, most important influence on the individual is not government. It is civil society, those elements of the collectivity that lie outside government: family, neighborhood, church, Rotary club, PTA, the voluntary associations that Tocqueville understood to be the genius of America and source of its energy and freedom.

Moreover, the greatest threat to a robust, autonomous civil society is the ever-growing Leviathan state and those like Obama who see it as the ultimate expression of the collective.

Obama compounds the fallacy by declaring the state to be the font of entrepreneurial success. How so? It created the infrastructure — roads, bridges, schools, Internet — off which we all thrive.

Absurd. We don’t credit the Swiss postal service with the Special Theory of Relativity because it transmitted Einstein’s manuscript to the Annalen der Physik. Everyone drives the roads, goes to school, uses the mails. So did Steve Jobs. Yet only he conceived and built the Mac and the iPad.

Obama’s infrastructure argument is easily refuted by what is essentially a controlled social experiment. Roads and schools are the constant. What’s variable is the energy, enterprise, risk-taking, hard work and genius of the individual. It is therefore precisely those individual characteristics, not the communal utilities, that account for the different outcomes.

Read more: http://humanevents.com

CVN MEMBER CONTRIBUTION

Proposed 28th Amendment

by Terry Sigmon - U.S. Army Veteran

July 20, 2012

No one  has been able to explain to me why young men and  women serve in the U.S. Military for 20  years, risking their lives protecting freedom,  and only get 50% of their pay on retirement.  While Politicians hold their political  positions in the safe confines of the  capital, protected by these same men and women,  and receive full-pay retirement after serving  one term. It just does not make any  sense.

Proposed 28th Amendment  to the United States Constitution: "Congress  shall make no law that applies to the  citizens of the United States that does not  apply equally to the Senators and/or  Representatives; and, Congress shall make no  law that applies to the Senators and/or  Representatives that does not apply equally  to the citizens of the United States  ."

If you agree that members of our military should have the same retirement benefits as members of Congress, then contact your Senators and representatives at the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 or send an email to let them know you support the proposed 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.