O's Roanoke Doctrine

Obama's Roanoke Doctrine: Profit Must Be Rewarded With Confiscation

By CHARLES R. KESLER
Posted 09/17/2012 07:04 PM ET

In a so far lackluster campaign, Republicans have landed few punches except against President Obama's memorable slur last July that "you didn't build that."

"Those ads taking my words about small business out of context — they're flat-out wrong," Obama complained in a reaction ad.

Actually, he hadn't mentioned "small" business in that part of his speech in Roanoke, Va.; he was speaking of millionaires. In the preceding paragraph, he had compared his policies to Bill Clinton's, who'd asked "the wealthy to pay a little bit more" in taxes. This wasn't a request, however; it was an order.

At any rate, the results were splendid, according to Mr. Obama.

"We created 23 million new jobs, turned a deficit into a surplus, and rich people did just fine. We created a lot of millionaires."

Who is this "We" who created so many jobs and millionaires? It's the same We who hovers over the notorious sentences that Mr. Obama complains were ripped out of context. If "you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own," he said. And eight sentences later, "If you've got a business — you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen."

His defenders claim he was talking about "roads and bridges," mentioned in the preceding sentence. Fair enough, though in that case he should have said "you didn't build those." Perhaps his grammar slipped; but the meaning is clear enough.

Who is the "somebody else" who builds the roads and bridges, employs the "great teacher" you had, and invents the Internet? It's We, the government, and if you think your own intelligence or hard work played a decisive role in your success — well, you need more public schooling.

Paul Ryan is precisely correct, then, to criticize Obama for advocating "a government-centered society."

Few would disagree that government's job is to supply genuine public goods like roads, bridges and national security. But the president regards individual economic success as itself a kind of public good, and not primarily a matter of talent, insight, pluck and the vicissitudes of the marketplace.

How strange that the great advocate of "Yes, We Can" says to entrepreneurs, in effect, "No, You Didn't."

It's less strange when you consider his assertions in a still larger context, one that for political reasons he would rather ignore: American liberalism's long-standing criticism of individualism itself.

Writing at the dawn of modern liberalism, Woodrow Wilson argued that government didn't originate in a social contract between free and equal individuals, as the Declaration of Independence presumed, but instead grew out of primitive patriarchal and tribal relationships.

"Government came, so to say, before the individual." In the beginning, "the individual counted for nothing; society ... counted for everything." Any rights that individuals possessed came not from nature or God but from their membership in a group. There were no "individuals" by nature, hence no individual or natural rights.

When in advanced societies individual rights eventually emerged, they remained a by-product of group development. John Dewey put it bluntly:

"The laws and institutions are not means for obtaining something for individuals, even happiness. They are means of creating individuals. ... Individuality in a social and moral sense is something to be wrought out."

In other words, individuals do not create and ordain government; government creates and ordains individuals. "You didn't build that" because We built you! Each person, in liberalism's view, is a kind of ongoing government project.

In his influential form of this argument, John Rawls, whose book "A Theory of Justice" was all the rage at Harvard Law School when

Mr. Obama was a student, held that justice required imagining yourself in an "original position" behind "a veil of ignorance" occluding all knowledge of your talents, intelligence and interests.

The point was to encourage everyone to think of his abilities, virtues and possible economic success as disconnected from justice and somehow randomly distributed.

"There are a lot of smart people out there," after all, and "a whole bunch of hardworking people out there," too, to quote the president. He didn't want any American to take pride in individual merit because, as Rawls taught, no one really has a right to one's own talents or to other "advantages" like smarts or a work ethic.

Accordingly, you don't deserve to profit from these without giving something back, not out of charity or gratitude but, in effect, out of guilt over the arbitrary inequality of it all. Fairness requires, therefore, redistributing some of the proceeds of your luck to the "least advantaged," who are morally worthy even if some of them spend their days, as Rawls noted, idly counting blades of grass.

So you didn't build that because you, a free man or woman, either do not exist outside the fostering state or have no right to your own talents and accomplishments without begging the state's pardon. No wonder so many Americans rightly sensed the radicalism in

President Obama's Roanoke Doctrine. In context, it is even more apparent.

• Kesler teaches government at Claremont McKenna College. His new book, "I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism," was just published by HarperCollins (Broadside Books).