Yes, he is correct that no man is an island. Each of us is somewhat dependent on others. And yes, luck matters. But to hear his speech, it appears that he thinks that the only difference between success and failure is luck, and government assistance. Maybe with his friends, but that isn't the case for the rest of us.
ScopeRoller isn't a big operation, and it isn't a big employer, but it does provide my son some hours at a decent pay rate, so he doesn't have to do pizza delivery, and it has provided some hours to others in this area in the last year or two.
I work very hard to make it a success. In the last few weeks, I have been looking for ways to make the caster sets for the Losmandy G11 and Celestron CI-700 tripods a little cheaper to make, and easier for customers to use at the same time. (And amazingly enough, this isn't a tradeoff, but a matter of improving design in one area has benefits in another.) I spent much of the weekend rewriting the website in Javascript.
This isn't luck. It's hard work and thought. I rather doubt Obama has any experience with either.
Whether or not Obama is a Marxist, he does seem to have a fondness for the Labor Theory of Value. Only those directly involved in producing the firm's product and/or service are actually responsible for building the business. Like any unionist, Obama views proprietors and management as parasites.
ReplyDeleteThis isn't luck. It's hard work and thought. I rather doubt Obama has any experience with either.
ReplyDeleteThis seems unlikely to me. The man wasn't born to wealth or position and now he is POTUS. Sure he had a lot of luck along the way but it wasn't all luck.
Mr. Shearer: Obama was actually raised in some wealth. Punahoe school in Hawaii was not a private school where middle class kids went.
ReplyDeleteIf Obama has worked hard anywhere, it doesn't show. The remarks by a fellow student at Harvard Law Review that came out after the election indicate that he was hired as figurehead, and really didn't do anything.
While he's right that other people help in building the business--he likes to use the examples of roads, teaching, and so forth (although teaching isn't the given he makes it out to be...)--he ignores two crucial points:
ReplyDeleteFirst, that the businessman helps many people by providing products, goods, and work.
Second, just as a businessman is helped by a teacher, or a construction worker, or whatever, that teacher or construction worker was helped by the businessman, through the money the businessman made. If he attended a public school, he paid for that school via property taxes; the roads are paid by his tax dollars; even those in the private sector were helped by him, because he paid for the services and goods needed.
That is, it's true that businesses receive help--but it's a mutual help, and that none of it would exist without the free trade of either party!
Madalyn Dunham was a salaried manager at the Bank of Hawaii, Stanley Dunham sold insurance, and the two lived in a condominium in an unremarkable neighborhood in Honolulu. The family was of the professional-managerial bourgeoisie, fairly affluent but likely not wealthy.
ReplyDeleteIt is true there is something glibly superficial about his thinking and a lack of seriousness of purpose in his life course.
Not wealthy by modern standards, perhaps, but Punahoe was a pretty expensive private school. My wife lived in Hawai'i at the time, and even though her father was corporate executive (not a very big corporation), Punahoe was where the rich kids went.
ReplyDeleteObama is just another product of academia that lives in a fantasy land. When such idiots do get into a company like many of those MBA idiots we had to contend with out at HP they show how smart they are by wrecking the company!
ReplyDeleteThat is your wife's impression of other people's balance sheets.
ReplyDeleteYou had four working adults born in 1922, 1936 and 1942 (one a salesman, one a bank manager, one an engineer, and one a sometime functionary of the Ford Foundation). You have just two children. Most people born ca. 1929 had three or four children and (among the bourgeoisie) just one salary. It should not surprise anyone that the expenditure patterns of Madalyn Dunham's household were different than most in Honolulu. That does not mean the Dunhams were ever sitting atop a pile of stocks and bonds and could have afforded to retire. Nothing about their life prior to 1960 suggests they ever inherited money or earned enough to do more then set aside some for savings.
Not just my wife's impression. "But his friends quickly dismissed that notion. "I wouldn't call it an exaggeration," Greg Ramos said. Keith Peterson said: "Did I ever party with Barack? Yes, I did. Do I remember specifically? If I did, then I didn't party with him. Part of the nature of getting high is you don't remember it 30 minutes later. Punahou was a wealthy school with a lot of kids with disposable income.
ReplyDeleteRead more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tim-graham/2012/05/11/washpost-2007-08-coverage-obamas-punahou-school-years-mostly-gooey-baske#ixzz20zBbblUA"
When you say 'wealthy', you are referring to 2-3% of the population who are asset rich. Children of that stratum are known to socialize with children from other strata, whether they meet them in school or not. We know enough of the life of Stanley & Madalyn Dunham to surmise that they were likely not asset-rich, merely people who spent there money on school tuition rather than housing (very expensive in Honolulu) or cars (recall the story of her waiting for the bus).
ReplyDeleteAccording to wikipedia Obama had a scholarship at Punahou.
ReplyDelete