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July 23, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:52
July 23, 2012, Monday, Hour #2
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Greetings to you, music lovers, thrill seekers, conversationalists all across the fruited plain, broadcast excellence as hosted by me, Rush Limboy, your guiding light, America's truth detector, real anchor man and doctor of democracy.
Doing what I was born to do.
And so are you.
I was born to host, you were born to listen, and it's working great.
Telephone number if you want to be on the program is 800 282882, the email address, L Rushball at EIBNet.com.
Last, well, two Fridays ago.
Barack Hussein Obama was in Roadlock, Virginia.
I want you to grab audio soundbite number seventeen.
This was Obama.
This is hilarious, by the way, folks.
What's coming up here?
You've heard the Obamas, what's coming up after the Obama.
Just want to repeat this.
Barack Obama, Roanoke, Virginia, on July 13th, explaining to people that if they started a business that they really didn't, that everybody else did it for them.
If you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own.
You didn't get there on your own.
I'm always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart.
There are a lot of smart people out there.
It must be because I worked harder than everybody else.
Let me tell you something.
There are a whole bunch of hard working people out there.
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.
There was a great teacher somewhere in your life.
Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we had that allowed you to thrive.
Somebody invested in roads and bridges.
If you got a business, that you didn't build that.
Somebody else made that happen.
The internet didn't get invented on its own.
Government research created the internet.
So then all the companies could make money off the internet.
Right, right, right.
That created all kinds of problems for the president, and it led to a member of defenders.
And he didn't really no, no, no, no.
But you heard the attitude.
He says that with uh phrases being mean.
The guy has an animus against people who's self-reliant.
And he's hellbent on telling them that they didn't do anything on their own.
And what he means is that everybody who's successful ended up stealing the labor of other people, or actually stealing their money or tricked them out of their money, or cheated them in business or what have you.
He doesn't believe in it.
Believes the state ought to pick winners and losers.
So then the defenders came along and said, Well, you're taking him out of context.
He was really talking about the roads and bridges.
And not businesses.
When he says business owners didn't build that.
You didn't do that.
This roads and bridges garbage is just it's also indicative of who these people are.
Roads and bridges, infrastructure, roads and bridges.
There's a road in front of everything.
If having a road in front of a business meant that it was successful, there would be nothing but successful businesses.
And if all you had to do to have a successful business have a bridge nearby, then there'd never never be a business that was a failure.
Well, the hits kept on coming.
And people kept pounding.
And it took its toll.
So last Friday in Jacksonville, we're going up to Audio Sound by 16.
Obama in Jacksonville was interviewed by WCTV Eyeball News correspondent Andy Alcock.
And Andy Alcock of uh Eyewitnesses News in Florida said, Look, I want I want to talk to you about comments you made in Virginia the other day, caused a little bit of a stir.
And I want to quote you exactly.
Part of what you said, if you got a business you didn't build at, somebody else made that happen.
On Tuesday, Governor Romney responded and said, say something like that is not only foolishness, it's insulting to every entrepreneur and every innovator.
Well, what is your response, Mr. President?
Well, the problem is you left out the sentence that I made before.
Uh so what I said was uh together we build roads and we build bridges.
And so if you've got a business, you didn't build that, meaning the roads and the bridges, not your business.
And anybody who actually watched the tape knows that's what I was referring to, and that's a point I've made millions of times, and that's a point Mr. Romney has made as well.
So this is just a bogus issue.
Right.
Uh Roads and bridges.
The fact is they did build the roads and bridges.
It was their taxes who built the roads and bridges.
He doesn't have terra firma on which to stand.
But anyway, this has caused, ladies and gentlemen, sheer panic in Obamaville.
And three days ago in the Washington Post, there was a piece by a guy named Dylan Matthews.
I'm almost reluctant to mention his name because this is so it's incomprehensible.
It is a piece on the Washington Post wonk blog entitled The Philosophy of You Didn't Build That.
It essentially is a dissertation on the philosophy of Obama's horrible speech on small business.
And what we have here is an intellectual trying to explain what Obama is so smart.
He's so much smarter than we are, that we cannot hope to keep up with him.
We can't we don't have a chance of truly understanding what he means.
He is so above us, we are so beneath him.
By now you've surely heard about Obama's You Didn't Build That Line.
In case you haven't, here's the full quote.
He gives the full quote.
The Romney campaign immediately seized on the moment for a campaign ad.
But as has been noted, Obama's speech is murky in terms of what values it expresses.
Descriptively it's clear what Obama means.
No one's ever built a road on their own, and if they had, it wouldn't be good enough to drive on.
Who says that somebody couldn't build a road anyway?
I don't want to get sidetracked here.
But let's suppose that you did build a road entirely on your own.
Now keep in mind now this piece is to defend Obama and what he said.
Let's suppose you did build a road entirely on your own and you charge tolls and you make a lot of money off it.
Do you deserve the money?
After all, you did all the work yourself.
Then again, maybe you only know how to build a road because you had good parents who paid for good schools, where you learned about civil engineering, and even if they hadn't, maybe you're only capable of understanding the concepts needed to build a road because you inherited DNA, it gave you a brain that can understand those concepts.
Maybe you wouldn't even have to have gotten into civil engineering unless an aunt had given you a book on it as a present, and if she had chosen to give you a book on rocketry instead, you would have pursued that career.
Do you still deserve that money?
Are you with me so far?
Well, hang in there.
Political philosophers are sharply divided on these questions.
Many do not like the idea that people deserve things at all.
For one thing, most people think that to deserve something a person must have done something to deserve it.
Well, that implies that there are actions that for which certain people are responsible.
Seems obvious.
A lot of metaphysicians don't think so.
For one thing, that claim presupposes the existence of free will.
Some philosophers are what is called hard determinants, who deny that anything that could be called free will exists.
Others called compatibilists or soft determinists believe that it is both true that free will exists and that every action is determined.
The reason that free will exists if people can act according to their own motives without interference.
Those motives are determined by factors outside those people.
Compass compatibilists argue, but they still have free will.
Are you still with me here?
This is Dylan Matthews didn't explain what Obama meant.
But if hard or Soft determinism is true.
How can people be responsible for their actions and thus deserve things because of them?
The philosopher Harry Frankfurt of Princeton tried to explain how this could be so.
In the nineteen sixty-nine paper Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility, he argued that there are many cases where we would hold somebody responsible for an action, even when the person could not have acted otherwise.
Suppose you're going to get a burrito for lunch, and you can either go to Chipotle or Codoba.
Suppose also that I have implanted a chip in your brain such that if you decide to go to Codoba, chemicals are released into your brain that change your mind, and you instead decide to go to Chipotle.
Suppose finally that you get up, you decide to go to Chipotle, you eat your burrito in peace without my chip ever being activated.
You are clearly responsible for going to Chipotle.
Chipotle, fine.
But you could not have done otherwise.
Chipotle said one voice Chipotle.
It's spelled C H I P O T L E Chipotle.
That's it.
You're telling me it's Chipotle.
Well, I'm gonna call it Chipotle because I've never heard the word pronounced that way, and it doesn't matter.
Chipotle?
Okay, I'm gonna read the paragraph again.
Because you have distracted everybody now from the this is a piece written by an intellectual pseudo intellectual, attempting to explain why Obama was right when he said you didn't build it.
Suppose you're gonna go get a burrito for lunch and can either go to Chipotle or Codoba.
Suppose also that I have implanted a chip in your brain, such that if you decide to go to Codoba, chemicals are released into your brain that change your mind.
You instead decide to go to Chipotle.
Suppose finally you get up, you decide to go to Chipotle, you eat your burrito in peace without my chip ever being activated, you're clearly responsible for going to Chipotle, but you could not have done otherwise.
The problem is that you are not morally responsible for going to Chipotle if you were originally planning to go to Codoba and the chip does fire.
And if causal determination is true, your DNA and brain chemistry are more or less equivalent to that chip in both cases, something you have no control over is manipulating your brain and making you do things.
So it's possible that the philosopher Harry Frankfurt is wrong, and we cannot deserve things if free will is false.
Now some political philosophers think desert is possible even if determinism means individual moral responsibility is impossible.
Now again, I'm reading to you word for word from a piece in the Washington Post Wonk blog attempting to explain what Obama meant when he said you didn't do that.
You didn't do that on your own.
Some political philosophers that you're still trying to figure out why you went to Chipotle and that chip in your brain.
You're still trying to figure out what the hell is Limbaugh talking about what chip in my brain that didn't fire or did fire what's it gotta do with free will and whether or not I wanted a freaking burrito.
But we're moving on.
While you're still trying to figure that out, remember now you can't keep up with Obama.
You are just too beneath him.
Some political philosophers think that desert is possible, and it's not desert because there's only one S. You want to argue with me about this?
Doesn't make sense either way.
So don't get caught up in this.
Some political philosophers think That desert is possible even if determinism means individual moral responsibility is impossible.
John Rawls, in his book, A Theory of Justice, endorsed what he called institutional desert.
There are certain institutions he reasons that a just society must have.
People deserve whatever benefits or treatment these just institutions would provide them.
But they do not deserve this treatment because of things they've done.
They deserve them because justice demands institutions that provide this kind of treatment.
Most Rawlsians and other high liberals who support an institutional notion of justice, uh such as my old thesis advisor Tim Scanlan.
Oh yeah, old Tim lean to the left in real political terms, believing that just institutions would provide considerable economic and social support to citizens.
Utilitarians and other consequenti uh consequentialists.
Utilitarians and other consequentialists who think the moral action is about promoting good outcomes like happiness, usually reject the idea of desert.
Now some, like J.C. Smart of Monesh University also believe that determinism is true and precludes moral responsibility.
They take this as a reason to believe that we should just maximize good things, whether or not that results in people getting the goods they deserve.
Others concede that free will could exist, but they insist that even in that case, what matters is promoting good outcomes, not giving people what they deserve due to their actions.
Utilitarians are in some way even more left-leaning than Rawls, as the theory implies, according to Peter Singer and many others, that residents of rich countries should give almost all their money away to the poor.
And what's more, it doesn't particularly matter to utilitarians whether people give the money away voluntarily or if the government takes it from them.
As utilitarians don't believe that people have inalienable rights, such as a right against excessive taxation.
NYU's Sam Scheffler, whose view combined elements of high liberalism and consequentialism, has expressed concern that the unpopularity of desert among liberals in political philosophy disconnects the discipline from real political debates about welfare crime and other issues where responsibility and desert matter a great deal.
All of this, folks, I'm not halfway through this is to remember the headline of this piece, the philosophy of you didn't build that.
Funnily enough, the main proponents of a robust idea of desert within academic political philosophy are luck egalitarians.
Luck egalitarians who arguably the most left-wing contingent in real world political terms, seeing as they support eliminating inequalities in wealth due to differences in intelligence.
This school, which includes the late G. A. Cohen of Oxford and UC San Diego's Richard Arneson argues that it is morally imperative to minimize the degree to which people's life outcomes are attributable to luck.
I take a break here, folks, but I just want to share this with you because uh this is how they defend Obama in the Washington Post.
You didn't I it's pure utter nonsense, gobbledygook.
All right, now folks, this this thing I just read to you is real.
Dylan Matthews turns out as a senior at Harvard with apparently a lot of free time on his hands.
What's happened here is that the Washington Post has trotted out student, still in college to try to defend Obama.
And this you didn't build it, you didn't make that out.
You didn't do that on your own.
Everybody knows it.
So here's the way the guy concludes his piece.
So let's say you built that bridge.
Do you deserve the toll mummy?
It all depends on whether you can deserve anything, and on whether or not it even matters ethically that you get what you deserve.
Do any of us get what we deserve?
That's a matter of philosophical ethics.
In short, the answer a lot of philosophers give to you didn't build that is all right, so what?
So this guy spends thousands of words telling us that what he's just written doesn't matter.
A lot of philosophers give you didn't build that, all right, so what, which is perhaps why he writes in general politicians don't spend a lot of time listening to philosophers.
This is a this is where we are.
Obama's so much above us, so much smarter.
We can't hope to keep up.
Say, by the way, the philosophers would say it doesn't matter.
Because everybody knows what Obama meant.
He meant that you don't deserve what you have.
Let me just synthesize this for you, because with all this intellectual speak out there, this justification, you know, whether somebody deserves what they have or not is nothing more than misdirection.
What's happening?
What's happening right before your eyes, and what Obama meant to say, what he was saying in Roadlock, Virginia is very simple and it can be boiled down in a couple of sentences.
What he is doing is socializing private sector profits.
If he can socialize private, if he can claim that the government owns private sector profit, because the profit wouldn't have happened without government, then it strengthens his claim on those profits and on wages, by the way.
Makes his claim stronger.
It gives him the right to raise taxes on what is rightfully governments.
Because government created it.
When he's out there telling small business people you didn't make that, you didn't create that, you didn't make that happen.
He is not talking about roads and bridges.
He is talking about your business.
In his view, what he's attempting to do is tell as many Americans as he can make believe it.
And believe me, there are a lot of people, a lot more people that don't own businesses than there are people who do.
So he's targeting the people that don't own businesses.
That's the bigger number.
And the more those people he can convince that the business owner, the boss, the successful person doesn't deserve it because it couldn't have done what he did without the government or those other people making it possible by paying taxes for the stupid roads and stupid bridges.
Then he strengthens his claim on that money with those people.
So when he says we need to raise taxes on the rich and on the 1%, he says, Well, these other people supposed to say, yeah, yeah, yeah, because it's not even yours anyway.
He knows exactly what he's doing.
He's saying exactly what he means to say.
Now, in this case, he didn't mean to say it now.
He went off prompter, and he gave us a glimpse of the guy behind the mask.
He told us who he really is.
That's the big mistake, that's what the left has to cover up.
That's why we got all this gobbledygook on philosophy and what he really meant and how we're not strong enough, smart enough to keep up with him, but he's making a claim on every dollar of profit in this country.
By saying that it wasn't possible without somebody else intervening or granting permission or setting the stage for it to happen.
And in his world, that entity that does that is government.
So he's trying to wipe out this whole notion of hard work, the whole notion of what someone deserves and why.
Because no one deserves anything.
The government makes it all possible.
And because the government is filled with mean Republicans and stuff, they've picked the rich as their Friends, and they've chosen the rich to be the winners in these decisions of who gets what.
All money is Obama's.
All money is government.
What you have is what they have decided you get to end up with.
And Obama's argument is that the Republicans have decided that the wrong people get the money.
And he and the Democrats are riding to the rescue and are going to make sure that from now on, the rightful owners of that profit, the rightful owners of that business, they get it, or at least it's going to be taken away from the people who have it, because they don't deserve it.
That's what he's saying.
Nothing complicated about it.
It's hideous.
It's pathetic, but it's precisely what he's doing.
Because it's precisely what he thinks.
Because he has a r he's never done anything.
He hadn't accomplished diddly squat in the private sector.
He wouldn't know a payroll if he looked at it.
He wouldn't have the slightest idea how to meet one.
He wouldn't know how to start a business.
And yet he thinks he's got all the answers for all of this.
Because he deals in theory.
He doesn't deal in reality.
It's what an intellectual does.
Intellectual deals with theories and ideas, but in the real world, or your fingernails and hands get dirty.
They haven't slightest idea.
But since they're intellectuals, they're smarter than everybody else.
Now, why are they smarter than everybody else?
Because they work with words.
They work with ideas.
They work with communicating in words.
Primarily written words.
The more letters a man is of, more articles, the more things he writes, and the more brilliantly he writes them, the more intellectual he is.
And uh, by the way, takes me back to why do intellectuals hate capitalism.
It's another one.
The piece that explains this is about 2,000 words, and I can do it in one sentence.
Intellectuals hate capitalism because intellectuals are egomaniacs.
They think they're smarter than everybody else.
And if capitalism were just, they would be the ones who are rich because they're the ones who's smarter, and because they're the ones who's smarter than anybody else, they're the ones that deserve it.
But capitalism hasn't seen fit to reward college professors and academics with billionaire status.
And so there's something wrong with capitalism.
It's pure ego, folks.
Nothing more than that.
It's not hard to understand.
Intellectuals don't like capitalism, they don't like America because they resent it.
They're the smartest people in the world, and yet capitalism doesn't take care of them.
And that's why it's got to be changed.
That's Obama, that's his professors, that's the people who've mentored him, that's who they are.
Hard work doesn't count for things.
It's how smart you are.
In fact, in their world, the smarter you are, the less hard you have to work, and that ought to be rewarded.
It's a it's a neat perversion of so many American traditions and ethics.
Okay, let's go to the phones.
People have waited patiently.
We'll start in Chatham, New Jersey with Greg, and I'm really glad you waited, sir.
Welcome to the EIB network.
I it's my honor to wait for you anytime, Rush.
Thank you very much, sir.
understand that totally.
Rush, I want to preface my comments that are on the board there with a quick story.
Thank you for coming to the defense of uh the Constitution of the NRA.
I myself, this weekend got into a heated Facebook discussion with uh two of my friends that I've known since high school.
Uh they immediately started to uh trash the NRA and the blaming the Constitution for the ills of America.
I came to the defense of uh of both of those, and uh they both defriended me.
And one of them is actually a graduate of Princeton University, so uh Well, look at you're dealing with people who are pseudo-smart.
They think they're smarter than you, smarter than everybody else, actually defriended you over this.
See, Snerdley's snurdley's in there.
I must I must tell you, Greg, Snerdley's a little nervous today because he thinks that I'm blaming movies for this aurora thing.
And I'm not.
I got people out there attacking my constitution and blaming it.
And I'm not gonna sit here on my sizable tush and just sit here and take it.
I'm on your own.
I'm gonna push back on the Constitution did not make this thing happen out there.
Some Some demented wacko kid did for reasons that we may never fully understand.
Exactly, Russia.
We're not gonna stand for anybody uh putting the blame on the Constitution or the NRA.
Now, now I want to get to my my main comment before Snurley gets more nervous.
Um it's interesting that there's something inherently wrong with liberals, including Obama, where they have to emotionally inject themselves into tragedies like this.
And I'm referring to Obama's comments, which he made I heard him make twice since Friday, about his daughter, Sasha and Malia going to the movies when when everyone knows that if Sasha Malia went to the movies, they would be protected by the Secret Service, and yet he has to inject himself.
Yeah, you know, I I wasn't I wasn't sure about this.
I I well I didn't uh the source for me on this is uh solid.
This guy sends me a note, and remember now I'm I'm out playing golf on Friday, intermittent rain and so forth, and I'm really not you know cell phones out there, so I'm coming late to all this.
At the end of the day, Friday, I'm checking voluminous amounts of email, and I get a note from a guy that says, do you want to believe what...
Why is Obama do this?
He had to say, my daughters go to the movies, what if they had been in that theater?
And I looked at that and I said, did he really say that?
He really said that.
If I had a son, he would look just like Trayvon Martin.
My two daughters go to the movies.
What if they had been?
Um, as though, as though what are we to conclude that his two daughters are more important than people that were in that theater?
What, that's not what he meant?
What the hell did he mean?
Wait a second.
What is it?
Wait, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
No, no, no, no.
Look at I'm mayor of Realville.
Ideal in the literal.
First off, did he say my two daughters go to the movies?
What if they had been in that theater that night?
I want.
Did he did he say I wonder if even if he said I wonder if my two daughters had been in it?
Trying to relate to every Jordinary peons.
Just as they might be asking, gee, what if my daughters had been there?
Um if he has to yeah, he says if without those daughters, would he have a different reaction?
What's the deal here?
If if his daughters weren't there, then what what he had a different reaction?
If Trayvon Martin had been black, would he have had a different reaction to his son that he didn't have looking like Trayvon Martin?
I when I read that, when I read that note, I thought, well, this is very typical.
This is an ego maniac who really thinks that the people of this country think he is more important than any other human being alive in this country.
And then I said, can he only relate to this through his own flesh and blood?
Can he not relate to this?
What's simply the loss that people in that theater have experienced?
Folks, I'm just I don't know about you.
When I first heard about this, and I don't have kids, so I didn't think.
Well, what if my kids had been in there?
But I also didn't think, gee, what if my brother had been in there?
What if my nieces had been there?
I've got nieces and nephews.
I did not think, gee, what if they'd been in there?
It wasn't about me.
I guess is my point.
Was everything have to be about this guy?
And why does he have to turn everything of noteworthy consequence in this country around and so that it's about him?
My daughters go to the movies.
What if Malia and Sasha had been at the theater as so many of our kids do each day?
Michelle and I will be fortunate to hug our kids.
Well, I don't know.
I just don't know how many people that made this about them.
That's my only point.
Anyway, Greg, I'm glad you called.
I got a quick obscene profit timeout, folks.
Much more straight ahead, as you know, right after this.
Before we head back to the phones, I want to go back to Obama and you didn't do that.
You didn't make that happen.
As I think this is extremely important, what Obama is setting up here, what he's saying, attempting to socialize private sector profits, because it makes his claim on those profits and in fact wages stronger.
Because what Obama is in effect saying, and this is why there was so much justified outrage about it.
He's saying you didn't earn it.
You don't have any claim on anything you have.
You didn't earn it.
Others made it possible for you.
And you either cheated them or you didn't pay them, or you stole from them, or what have you.
And he's the agent that's going to come in and equalize all this and make it and make it fair.
Now, what Obama is saying about business is actually true about government.
The government has nothing on its own.
The government does nothing on its own.
It can't.
It has no money.
Everything the government does comes from us.
Now they can print it and they can borrow it, but it's important as a distinction to make that they do not produce it.
There is no correlating service or product or good or anything that comes with the printing of or the borrowing of money at the government level.
So what he's saying about business, you didn't earn it, it's the government that doesn't earn it.
It's the government that's the big sponge.
It's the government that just sits around, clips coupons, doesn't have to do anything all day, and gets 30% of everything.
You can look at it in one way as a really successful organized crime operation, complete with money laundering and everything else.
In a nutshell, and this is why the left is beside themselves here to try to defend this and to tell us that we're taking Obama out of context.
He's saying you didn't earn it.
Every one of you started a business, have a business, running a business, you didn't earn it.
And therefore, you have no claim on anything you have.
Now the reason this is huge, the reason that this is really, really big.
John Locke, the founders of this country, believed that private property was the bedrock of our liberty.
Private property, it's a point that I, El Rushbo, have made since the founding of this program in 1988, is as important as the right to free speech.
The founders, John Locke believed that there could be no real liberty unless there is property that the government cannot take from you.
And Obama is trying to erase that.
Obama is trying to wipe that off the books.
And there is a fundamental resentment that the underpinning of all of this.
And it is really no more complicated than they are intellectuals.
They use words, the written word primarily, to mobilize opinion, shape opinion.
They're smarter.
They are the elites.
And as such, since they are the self-appointed smartest, the self-appointed elites, they don't like capitalism.
Capitalism should be rewarding the smartest people.
They ought to be the wealthiest simply by virtue of their brains.
Nothing more.
No achievement necessary.
No accomplishment, simply their brain power.
And since capitalism doesn't work that way, they resent it.
They also hate it because capitalism does not need them.
As we are seeing.
All they do is screw it up.
I gotta go.
Quick break.
Everything going here at uh fast forward speed here, folks.
The fastest three hours in media, but don't go anywhere.
Barely scratch the surface.
All that economic news I talked about.
That's coming next.
And more of your phone calls when we get back.
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