OK, true, that’s just one way of looking at this fascinating exercise in clueless class warfare.
To set the scene: below is an annotated excerpt from the ‘independent’ video that is currently causing shortness of breath (and soon probably lightness of wallet) among the contingent of the Online Left who really and truly believe that their professional politician class is avoiding full-throated, Huey Long-style, Left-populist rants for no good reason. Well, Elizabeth Warren, new-minted sacrificial lamb Democratic candidate for MA-SEN, is there to give ’em what they want!
What do they want? To tax the poor!
When do they want it? Right now… wait, what?
Yeah, there’s the problem there. This interpretation (which I first saw from Lee Stranahan) of what Warren was trying to say takes into account rhe minor detail that making our current tax system more ‘fair’ will first require us to go out and tell the 45% of American households not paying income tax that they need to start paying income tax. Elizabeth Warren’s too afraid to do that, of course – heck, she wouldn’t even show the elementary courage needed to support Obama’s dead-on-arrival jobs bill – so I did her a favor by putting up the video. Because, really, it’s very responsible of her to take the position that taxes need to be raised – gathered – on people making less than fifty grand a year. Pure political suicide, but responsible.
Of course, there are also alternative opinions about Warren’s meaning. For example, Mark Hemingway thinks that this is a straw man argument, and that Warren is busily trying to class warfare her way out of the rhetorical trap that the Left has busily created for itself over the need for government. Ramesh Ponnuru takes the argument to its ultimate extreme, and finds a mandate for permanent agricultural subsidies (the Monsanto megacorp is going to love that one). Me? …Well, I did do the (above) video, so I’m kind of with Stranahan; but I have to admit that the default option of Elizabeth Warren is dumber than a sackful of hammers has a certain ring to it. If only because it’d mean that she has that special stupidity that’s only available to technically bright people who bubble themselves away from the real world because it’s just too damn scary for words. I enjoy seeing that kind of stupidity in the opposition party: it tends to eventually self-destruct in an entertaining fashion.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
PS: Last two links were via somebody or other; had a browser crash, lost them. Sorry.
Yah. I have two Facebook friends who have this Elizabeth Warren quote (same one) in two different forms (making this a third). I think you’ve missed the point here entirely. Most business people would grant her premise whole. Most conservatives would. The items she lists are all legitimate functions of government. She loses the thread when she says (later in the same speech): “”Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.” Keep a big hunk of it? Their job is to avoid taxes and create jobs.
There are many people ripping this one to shreds, NSBS. We can multitask. 🙂
The left is out-of-control excited about Warren, and out-of-control excited about this rant. I’d frankly vote for Martha Coakley twice before I’d vote for her. In her coming out comments on local radio, she claimed that she was going to Washington to re-instate the middle class in America. How exactly does government do such a thing? Good news is, she can’t win.
The whole thing is laughable. Nobody got rich on his own, eh? No, they got rich by selling something other people wanted. They exchanged value, traded something like money or time and received a good or service in return. She’s too damn stupid to grasp that simple concept. And if she’s going to rant about things “the rest of us paid for” well, where’s my free solar panels and GM auto? We paid for that nonsense too. But seriously, the “rest of us” includes that inventor or factory owner whose property/local/state taxes paid to educate those workers, to maintain highways etc. It’s nothing more than envy and conceit, a lust for someone else’s money and the arrogance to think she knows better than the person who earned. And don’t even get me started on the social contract nonsense…
@niall: They are sending a true ivory tower academic against a classic retail politician — and they are excited about it. Coakley’s was problem wasn’t so much that she was a bad candidate, it was that with a 30% lead at one point, she wasn’t prepared to be a candidate at all. She got caught flat-footed. Warren is less qualified than Coackley — by a wide margin.
Warren stumbles (completely by accident, I’m sure) into a fairly nice premise: the relationship between the private sector and the government needs to be a symbiotic one, not a parasitic one. What makes her statement into pure idiocy is her belief that the private sector is the parasite in the current scenario, when the opposite is the truth.