Georgia Business Owner Not Quite Certain That He Didn't Build That

"Kiss my ass," a sign says in response to "You didn't build that."

Below, a Romney ad -- "These Hands" -- you've probably seen. I never thought this thing would have this kind of leg in it.

Also below, a Romney ad attacking Obama for the ending of GM dealerships -- the "Vampire Corporatism" Obama practices. Jen Rubin finds the ad confusing or something:

Is Romney saying that in a “managed bankruptcy” these dealershiips wouldn’t have closed? If he is saying these guys got hit because the politically-connected UAW got sppecial treatment, that would make sense. The ad doesn’t say that.

In short, I don’t get the point of the ad.

Let me suggest the point of the ad starts as simple as tu quoque -- you did it too -- and then suggests more than that. Obama's whole attack on Bain is based on a deliberately infantile obtuseness about business. It's based on little-baby style thinking: People lost jobs. That's bad. If you fire someone that means you're a bad man.

But of course it's a great deal more complicated than that. Businesses prefer to grow and expand their operations and their employee base, opportunity and profit permitting; contractions are not sought, but are imposed by circumstance.

Romney's ad doesn't say that. But it certainly confuses Obama's baby-talk narrative. Because he must explain what makes his layoffs different from Bain's; the answer is that there is no difference. A business losing money must soon lose employees as well.

Some of Obama's people know this, but they trust that the typical Obama voter, who's been an employee all his life (and, disproportionately, a government employee, who has therefore never before even had to consider "What if my employer runs out of money?"), are too stupid to know this. Well, perhaps this ad might wake them up, as they ponder "Gee, why did the man fire those poor people?"

But more interesting than speculating about whether the typical Obama voter understands that a business either makes money or it shuts down is whether Obama himself knows it; certainly, most of his insipid rhetoric suggests that he believes people invest in businesses not to make profit and thereby improve their own (and their family's) economic status, but rather create companies as sort of a public charity for the strict purpose of employin' workin' folks.

No, employing working folks is a consequence of investment and entrepreneurship; but it's not the main goal.

Of course it's not. Only Obama voters, and maybe Obama himself, could possibly think that one breaks one's ass with a primary motive of benefiting of others.

I always want to ask these people: If you weren't drawing a paycheck from work, would you show up anyway, just for the benefit to the community and society? Government school teachers like to talk of "working for the children," and yet I can't seem to notice that checks in their name are sent out every two weeks.

Perhaps this ultimately just gets at the deliberate self-infantilization of the progressive left, wherein they actually do convince themselves that they themselves are "working for the public good" and that biweekly check is just some sort of fringe benefit they could either take or leave. And, having convinced themselves of this absurdity, they go on to deploy the delusion vindictively against others, accusing others of not working primarily for the benefit of others.

You know, like they do.

It's a wonderment to me that the Government Workers and Government Clients spend so much time and effort assiduously insuring that their incomes always rise, but then, when taxpayers, who are after all signing these checks, object that they'd like to see property tax rates capped so that they themselves can have a little more money themselves, say to the taxpayers: "How dare you."

The scary thing is that they seem to actually mean it. Like, it's not just theater. They are so gripped by their self-deception they're aghast at seeing someone else wish for a little extra money to spend as he pleases.

Maybe this is why they're so hostile to business people. Business people are pretty upfront about saying, "I'm working for myself," and are comfortable with both meanings of that sentence.

To people who have convinced themselves, psychotically, that they themselves are working "for the children" or "for the good of... the DMV," such a statement must seem very cold-hearted.

I think it's time we told the Government Clients that we no longer have the luxury of spending so much for their self-delusions and will no longer be signing off on their regularly-scheduled salary escalations.

posted by Ace at 05:45 PM

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