http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/dailypolitics/2010/10/vpotus-joe-biden-dems-will-kee.html
“Every single great idea that has marked the 21st century, the 20th century and the 19th century has required government vision and government incentive. In the middle of the Civil War you had a guy named Lincoln paying people $16,000 for every 40 miles of track they laid across the continental United States. … No private enterprise would have done that for another 35 years.”
So without the government, we'd be living with frontier days' technology. Wow...
Hmmm... let's see. EVERY great idea required government to get it done. Every idea?
How about the assembly line? That was invented (if invented is the correct word) by the Ford Motor Company in order to speed up production of the automobiles that they were selling to people in the private sector. No government subsidies or advice were necessary. But now assembly lines are used in virtually all manufacturing processes.
What about air conditioners? Nothing could be more pervasive in modern society than air conditioners. The original idea for a machine to cool the air in a building was conceived by John Gorrie in 1842, and he hoped to use such a machine to cool the air in his hospital. The first air conditioners in production were used to cool air for industrial processing, i.e. the private sector. Again, no government involvement in THAT.
Oh no, wait... Personal Computers! If anything was more revolutionary and is today more pervasive than a small computer that anyone can and does own, I don't know what it might be. I will admit that some of the miniaturization of the circuitry which made PC's possible was helped along by NASA's push to space, but the conception of a small computer that could sit on the top of a desk and be owned by anyone was purely an invention of the private sector. Do you honestly think that Bill Gates or Steve Jobs got their ideas from government, or that the government gave these home businesses grants? Of course not. Yet look at what they accomplished!
The list could go on and on. Cell phones. Aspirin. The entire motion picture industry. Electric guitars, for heaven's sake! I'm sure you could fill in many more such ideas that we take for granted today, that were conceived and developed without a single bit of help from the government.
The truth is that the private sector can get along just fine without the government trying to control or influence it, if only the government would get out of the way and let them do business. We don't need government to exist and thrive, but government sure does need us.
Biden's opinion is typical of the mindset of liberal extremists. To them, government is what makes us great. The rest of us know better.
His opinion also betrays his true opinion of us, of the private sector. We could not live without a government so powerful and pervasive that it "helps" us at every level of our lives.
And this is the man who is second-in-line to the Presidency. His boss shares these opinions, though I don't think he's ever said so as explicitly as Biden has.
Are you disturbed by Biden's opinion? If not, WHY not?
0 comments:
Post a Comment