"If you've got a business, you didn't build that."

[tonyz]

Originally Posted by Dusty

Nailed. And instituted quickly.

Originally Posted by Broadsword2004

I think what America needs is the regulations that create the incentives for the prudence and banking conservatism we see with the Canadian banks, but keeping the system decentralized could probably keep the system more flexible. Canada's banks are not subject to the politicism of America's banks regarding trying to get everyone a home as well.

Wow, you guys are harsh. You mean that potential borrowers should have verifiable, stable incomes, sound creditworthiness and appropriate down payments?

[Dusty]

Originally Posted by tonyz

Wow, you guys are harsh. You mean that potential borrowers should have verifiable, stable incomes, sound creditworthiness and appropriate down payments?

Madcap, eh?

[Hand]

Originally Posted by tonyz

Wow, you guys are harsh. You mean that potential borrowers should have verifiable, stable incomes, sound creditworthiness and appropriate down payments?

NO! That would be racists. hehe

Sorry - I do appreciate the thoughtful conversation in this thread. Thank you gentlemen for your time and clear thoughts.

[Paslode]

Originally Posted by tonyz

Wow, you guys are harsh. You mean that potential borrowers should have verifiable, stable incomes, sound creditworthiness and appropriate down payments?

Exactly.

[Stargazer]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...eck=0&denied=1

Once again, I think Charles spells out the"fallacies" of this President and his administration.

And who might that somebody else be? Government, says Obama. It built the roads you drive on. It provided the teacher who inspired you. It “created the Internet.” It represents the embodiment of “we’re in this together” social solidarity that, in Obama’s view, is the essential origin of individual and national achievement.

To say that all individuals are embedded in and the product of society is banal. Obama rises above banality by means of fallacy: equating society with government, the collectivity with the state. Of course we are shaped by our milieu. But the most formative, most important influence on the individual is not government. It is civil society, those elements of the collectivity that lie outside government: family, neighborhood, church, Rotary club, PTA, the voluntary associations that Tocqueville understood to be the genius of America and source of its energy and freedom.

Moreover, the greatest threat to a robust, autonomous civil society is the ever-growing Leviathan state and those like Obama who see it as the ultimate expression of the collective....

The ultimate Obama fallacy, however, is the conceit that belief in the value of infrastructure — and willingness to invest in its creation and maintenance — is what divides liberals from conservatives....

The argument between left and right is about what you do beyond infrastructure. It’s about transfer payments and redistributionist taxation, about geometrically expanding entitlements, about tax breaks and subsidies to induce actions pleasing to central planners. It’s about free contraceptives for privileged students and welfare without work — the latest Obama entitlement-by-decree that would fatally undermine the great bipartisan welfare reform of 1996. It’s about endless government handouts that, ironically, are crowding out necessary spending on, yes, infrastructure...

What divides liberals and conservatives is not roads and bridges but Julia’s world, an Obama campaign creation that may be the most self-revealing parody of liberalism ever conceived....

Beyond infrastructure, the conservative sees the proper role of government as providing not European-style universal entitlements but a firm safety net, meaning Julia-like treatment for those who really cannot make it on their own — those too young or too old, too mentally or physically impaired, to provide for themselves.

Limited government so conceived has two indispensable advantages. It avoids inexorable European-style national insolvency. And it avoids breeding debilitating individual dependency. It encourages and celebrates character, independence, energy, hard work as the foundations of a free society and a thriving economy — precisely the virtues Obama discounts and devalues in his accounting of the wealth of nations.

[tonyz]

IMO, this particular paragraph (in bold cited above) is worthy of repeating, so as to not be missed.

Thank you Stargazer (and Charles, of course).

"Limited government so conceived has two indispensable advantages. It avoids inexorable European-style national insolvency. And it avoids breeding debilitating individual dependency. It encourages and celebrates character, independence, energy, hard work as the foundations of a free society and a thriving economy — precisely the virtues Obama discounts and devalues in his accounting of the wealth of nations."

[Flagg]

I'm blatantly stealing this analogy/metaphor from another, but here goes:

Imagine society as a conveyor belt.

We either place the results of our labor onto it, or we take the results of others' labor off of it.

Some place more onto the conveyor belt than others.

Some take more off the conveyor belt than others.

What matters is the net difference of whether you contribute to or require support from society.

What also matters is that entrepreneurs are probably the only group in society who are able to make money while concurrently solving societies problems.

Entrepreneurs actually create wealth.

"Giving back to society" is based on the assumption that wealth is finite and cannot be created......it assumes wealth was taken rather than created.

So if entrepreneurs actually create wealth where it previously didn't exist.....then it's unfair to demand they "give back" what wouldn't have existed without their efforts.

[tonyz]

Whittle makes his case.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/QXEoQJ7...yer_detailpage