Offered in response to Anthony Sokolow's defense of Obama's deception on "infrastructure":
Infrastructure -- Government spending -- does not create Prosperity, Liberty does.
You write as if Government is a god, creating ex nihilo. But it doesn't. All that Government "gives" – including infrastructure – is paid for by its citizens through either taxes, debt, or inflation.
Every dollar spent by a politician – which politician knows better than you what to do with your own wealth, Tony? – is a dollar that the one who earned it no longer has to use for his own purposes.
Having a political "elite" decide how everyone else should live is fine as long as you're part of that elite, but it's not Liberty.
Charles Krauthammer on Obama's fundamental dishonesty regarding "infrastructure" (h/t Tom):
Spoken by a man who never created or ran so much as a candy store.
And it's completely a straw man argument — as if conservatives and Republicans are arguing to disband the fire department and the police department so we can all do it individually on our own. The idea that infrastructure is necessary and good is as old as the republic. It's older than that. The Romans had the Via Appia and that wasn't exactly a new idea. And they had the sewers as well.
The question is: What do you do with the money once you build the infrastructure? You heard Obama talking about the moon shot. … in that speech. He went through a list of the great achievements that the government has done. The moon shot. Well, Obama's the guy who shut down the moon program — manned space program so that today we have to outsource our access into space. For any American astronaut who wants to go to the space station we have to pay the Russians $50 million a shot.
He spoke about the invention of the Internet, which he neglected to say was the work of Al Gore. In fact, it wasn't the government that invented it, in general, it was the Defense Department, a part of the government. And what has Obama done as he sprinkled billions of dollars on all the other departments in government? He shrunk the Defense Department and it's now looking at draconian cuts.
This is a man that spent $1 trillion [stimulus] and left not a residue. He could have, for example, done something about the electric grid. He did nothing on that. Instead he sprinkled the money on cronies, pie in the sky ideological fetishes, like solar panels and electric cars…. Money wasted, it's water on the sand. He did not leave behind residue on all that, and yet he speaks of infrastructure.
All of us want infrastructure — but real infrastructure. And leave the rest of life to the private individual and the entrepreneur.
