Elizabeth Warren Resurrects Her ‘You Didn’t Build That’ Speech in New Hampshire
“You built it at least in part, getting your goods to market on roads and bridges all of us helped pay to build.”
Elizabeth Warren is already dusting off her greatest hits. While speaking to supporters in New Hampshire on Monday, she launched into her old favorite sermon about how no one in America becomes wealthy on their own.
Chris Enloe of The Blaze provides a transcript:
Warren’s remarks came during a Labor Day stump speech in New Hampshire advocating her wealth tax proposal, which would impose an annual 2 percent tax on households with assets greater than $50 million and a 3 percent tax for households with more than $1 billion in assets.
“Some of these guys say, ‘I worked hard. I had a great idea. I worked late’ — oh yeah, unlike anybody else. But ‘I worked late or inherited wealth, and so this is mine,'” Warren mocked. “And the answer is yeah, you did. You did have a great idea and you did work hard.
“But here’s the deal,” she continued, “I guarantee you built it at least in part using workers all of us help pay to educate. Yeah. You built it at least in part, getting your goods to market on roads and bridges all of us helped pay to build. Yep. You built it at least in part, protected by police and firefighters all of us help pay their salaries.
“And we are glad to do it. These are the investments we make as Americans,” Warren went on to say. “But here’s the thing: When you make it big, I mean really big, I mean the top 1/10th of 1 percent big, pitch in two cents so everybody else gets a chance to make it in this country.”
Here’s the video:
Some have suggested that this is a reprise of Obama’s famous “you didn’t build that” remark. This actually goes back to something Warren has been saying for years:
Warren did not even come up with this line of thinking on her own. It was something she adapted from Berkeley professor George Lakoff.
Professor Jacobson wrote about this back in 2012:
Obama and Warren cribbed “build it” narrative from progressive Berkeley Professor
This narrative is cribbed almost verbatim from the narrative of George Lakoff, a progressive linguistics activist and Professor at Berkeley. Like Warren, Lakoff was one of the academics who helped frame how the Occupy Wall Street movement presented itself. Lakoff’s writings and theories seek to transform progressive politics and he is a frequent speaker on how progressives can reframe the political debate.
Lakoff developed a linguistic narrative that progressives needed to counter conservatives by focusing on the role of government in enabling individual success, a narrative in which no person became successful on his or her own:
Nobody makes a dollar in this country in business without using the common wealth…. The idea that there’s a self-made man, that’s there’s a self-made millionaire is false, it is absolutely false, and that is the thing that Obama missed…. Without this you don’t have those roads, you don’t have that internet, you don’t have the banking system, etc.
See below:
Featured image via YouTube.
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Comments
Red ideology is all Democrats have to sell.
I say
THEY didn’t build it either!
Democrats build nothing – but tax everything.
Democrats do STEAL a whole lot though……..
So according to Warren if you didn’t invent the wheel then someone else made it all happen?
Lakoff looks like he’s been eating more than his share…
SHE didn’t build a damn thing–she stole it all, by virtue of the fraud she perpetrated for decades on various people/institutions–she’s nothing but loud-mouthed grifter–she needs to stfu
Which came first, the goods or the roads? Notice they do not address this question.
They were both spontaneously generated.
Like DNA.
Many years ago, WalMart decided to put a store in my city. The area they bought did not have a road that was convenient so by golly, they built their own road from the highway right past their store so people could get in and out conveniently. They, WalMart, built that road and put in the drainage systems and etc. so people could get to their store.
Warren is so stupid and idiotic when she says things like that. Governments didn’t take over the building of roads until it was convenient to do so.
American Human: Governments didn’t take over the building of roads until it was convenient to do so.
Yeah, bunch of SJWs.
1787: The Congress shall have power … To establish Post Offices and post Roads.
Not all roads …. Just those related to postal service. Original turnpikes were commecial. Also, think of Erie Canal. Always a partial truth Zac.
alaskabob: Not all roads
That’s right, just the most important roads, including the postal roads, and on the local level, most town roads.
How many politicians have created anything of value, especially contemporary politicians?
The odds that she will be the nominee are increasing rapidly. Biden is too senile and that will only become more and more obvious the deeper we get into this. Bernie is too white, old and perpetually angry. His base tops out at about 20% and I don’t think he can do better than that.
Gabbard did us all a favor when she publicly eviscerated Harris in the last debate likely ending any chance Harris had of being the nominee. The rest of the crew are just hopelessly trying to stay relevant.
That leaves Warren. Yes she is old, white and angry like Bernie but she checks the gender box which broadens her appeal well beyond what he can reach.
We all know Warren’s weakness. The reality that her entire professional life and now political life was build upon the grandest of lies and the worst of cultural appropriations. The big question is will one of the other Democrat candidates go after this weak spot now or soon in an effort to derail her momentum or are they going to let her get the nomination in hope that she can beat Trump?
If she is the nominee, Professor Jacobson best dust off the wiki because he will be a key figure in exposing the total fraud that is Elizabeth Warren.
I think all of the DNC are under orders to stay away from Warren’s “heritage” and Biden’s age.
Bernie was never “one of them”. The DNC has been wanting to jettison Bernie for 3 years. His purpose was to show us how strong a candidate Hillary was. That pretty much backfired when the sheeple said “how about that guy, he can’t be worse than Hillary.” Now they’re stuck with him and his communist anarchists. The DNC would love to see Bernie gone.
The only one with the stones to attack anyone is Tulsi and they pretty much won’t let her participate anymore because of it.
I think that in the past 4 years, Sanders has lost some of his quickness. Now he looks more like a crazy old man just waving his arms around. He used to do that before, but you didn’t notice it as much because verbally he was very adroit. Now, verbally more ordinary, and looks older.
Sanders got huge crowds, Trump-size, 4 years ago. I don’t think he could repeat that now.
We on the ‘right’ are not lucky enough for them demo to land Warren as their candidate
it would be like Trump running against Hillary all over again, except Fauxohantus is even more crazy than the pantsuit
the Democrats have to realize the only ‘electable’ candidate in the current running is Biden, but half their party will feel snobbed again if old “whitey” is the face of their election bid
Biden is the only one that can appeal to the independent body in the states that matter in the 2020 cycle like Florida, Ohio, Iowa, Virginia, North Carolina,and Wisconsin
I really do think if one of their ‘fringe’ candidates does manage to get the nom, states like Nevada and Colorado could swing red
Maybe Ben Shapiro too… he remembers her from HLS even though he never he never took her class.
So if no one builds anything themselves, then no one owns what they built. It all belongs to the collective. And anybody who denies their debt to the collective is a liar.
I guess we’d better listen. Because nobody knows lies better than Chief Warren.
Yes, it is obvious that no person “ever got rich on his own.” But that statement does nothing to undermine sensible forms of laissez-faire individualism. The reason why people do not get rich by themselves is not that they lack self-reliance or ambition. It is because the individuals who succeed understand the key proposition that personal gains result only through cooperation with others. The common business school refrain of win/win deals is not an observation about one person: it is, at its core, about two (or more) people, all of whom win through cooperative arrangements.
– Richard Epstein
She’ll get in trouble with the cars-are-destroying-the-planet people.
Why? Because those who don’t own cars complain that they shouldn’t have to pay for roads, because they don’t use them. And here come Warren to tell them that, yes, they do use them- every time they buy something that got to the store in a motor truck!
(Although, truly, the more ideologically committed tend to be proficient in Doublethink.)
Is it just me or does Lakoff literally looks like he feeds at the trough. Now if we could only somehow come up with a good appropriate nickname for him, perhaps one that he was subjected to relentlessly throughout childhood. Hmmmm, what could it be?
My favorite video from the day (2011) was this guy, Mattwillwork, rebutting Lizzy’s tirade.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdE78PlFP5k
Certainly if she can dig up and reuse, so can I.
Hope someone starts throwing Warren’s support for Occupy– with the property damage they caused, and the costs to cities in policing and clean-up services– right back in her smug face.
Every time I hear a politician say this or something similar, it always makes me think of lines given to mobsters in movies. Once you do them a favor, you owe them forever……Once you use a road or walk into a building that had any fed involvement…..same thing.
the problem with the logic of the “you’d didn’t build THAT” notion is that the previous foundations the modern world was built upon – belongs to ALL, not the elected body trying to dictate government policy and their constituents who voted them into office
even the ‘rich’ the Democrats bemoan about, inherit the same benefit as a member of our culture
I have to laugh…….didn’t these people ALSO pay taxes for the roads which were built, the people who were educated, et al?
Shrieking harpy..
This is the classic straw man argument. No successful person I’ve ever met has argued that they did everything “by themselves.” I suppose if I had been born earlier and had met some fur trappers they might have thought that, but I digress. This is just more intellectually weak argument from a pathetic Marxist prog trying to pick your pocket.
Of course we all benefit from things that society has done… The Constitution states that government shouldn’t be doing anything that doesn’t benefit everyone equally, so of course this is the case.
The point is that we ALL benefit from the government provided infrastructure. If there was some magical power to generate wealth contained in that infrastructure, wouldn’t EVERYONE be fabulously successful and wealthy?
No, some people are still smarter, luckier and work harder than others. And that Marxist bitch wants to rob those people at the point of the government’s gun so she can give freebies to her voters. Fuck that lying bitch.
But it maintains the premise that the workers value is being stolen and only government can steal… er… return it to the workers.
No, it doesn’t say that.
She thinks she got elected to the Senate. But it was thanks to our roads and people we educated who got her there. So we are all senators of Massachusetts.
Several elections back the liberal/socialist wannabe axis was pushing the idea that any public works are socialism, so since we have governments which do things like patch potholes in public roads we’re already socialist. So a little more (or a lot more) can’t be bad. Post Office, airport traffic controllers, government standards for meat inspection . . all signs that we’re already indistinguishable from the USSR.
I don’t mind liberals being stuck on stupid. But I’m not too wild about them being so righteous about it. I just ran into one who seriously thinks that antifa are combating fascism. An intelligent person, too, but blinding stupid.
Looking at the spectrum of IQ in the country, a large segment isn’t capable of thinking how to build that. Instead they think up stupid stuff….which they are fully capable of doing.
Of ALL people in America, this cultural heritage thief Fauxcahontas is the last person qualified to usurp credit from anybody for anything.
What a rotten POS she is.
She’s a total fraud.
LOOK at the law school she went to: Rutgers. A good school – to be sure – but it’s ranked 62.
NO ONE gets hired into the Ivy League to teach law from Rutgers (go look at the UPENN Law School staff).
She got in purely by playing the race card.
The “You didn’t build that” meme misses because it doesn’t notice the “added value” concept.
That is, one man invented the wooden wheel, but someone else added value by adding a metal hoop rim to it. Another man added value by learning to grease the axle. Another added value by inventing the spoked wheel. Another added value by inventing the brake.
It is true that hoop rim, the spoke wheel, axle grease, and the brake have no value without the wheel, but each of these things greatly increased the value of the wheel.
Yes, everyone stands on the shoulders of giants, but through our efforts we rise above the giants.
all of us helped pay to build
—————————–
all of us were FORCED to pay to build.
little different when stated truthfully huh….
There are plenty of people who produce nothing, who create no enterprise, who pay little or no taxes, who contribute nothing tangible, and who regularly reap financial benefits from the working public. They also have the right to use the roads, use public education, use the bridges, use police and fire protection, use public transportation, and use the internet. So Warren’s and the Berkeley professor’s points are meaningless except to justify only the latest version of class warfare and the state’s confiscation of goods. It’s a bit much listening to a woman who lied about her ancestry to get the advantages of racial quotas, who made over $350,000 a year teaching one class at Harvard, who uses “the rich” in the third person as if she isn’t one of them, now lecturing us on how we need to give more; and it will be a lot more than “two cents” to fund her extravagance.
My business would still exist without police and fire. It might actually be larger than it is today. And as for roads… 3/4 of the roads in my state are dirt roads that pre-date organized government building or what passes for maintenance.
On a related note, did you know that 70% of fire fighters in the US are volunteers?
If she actually believed what she said, she would have my vote. Government should pay for police and fire — check. Government should pay for primary education —check. Government should pay for basic infrastructure— check. And the tax rate on even the highest income should not exceed two percent, “two cents” — check. On the basis of this speech, Sen. Warren is a libertarian to the right of Rand Paul.
Fauxcahontas disn’t build her feathers. She stole them.
She’s talking to people who escaped Mass because of people like her.
Hey liz, you’re wrong, and you know it, so you are lying.
We ALL paid taxes to build that road. What matters is how we each use it.
***************
A mother used the road to take kids to school.
A wage worker used the bus to get to work.
A baker got up a 4 AM to make the day’s bread.
An entrepreneur worked all night to build a wildly successful business, coming home only in the wee hours, exhausted but happy.
And your core voters went to pointless meetings to make meaningless points, to gratify their craving for virtue-signaling, producing nothing. They add only to your destructive drive for grievance groups.
***************
YET you would rob people in INVERSE proportion to the value they truly add. Good luck with that.
They just keep inventing ways to justify their greed for your money.
“Lizzy Warren”, is a communist in Socialist clothing! her ideas are stolen from “otner” socialists, brainwashed College professors, etc! She would have you think she has the answer for America’s future success in the world…..{ No Way}…..Same old bath House Barry, & *Demoncrat* party rhetoric…..None of which our forefathers intended for this country to suffer under! Nepotism, greed, corruption, lack of substance, & no soul…..Elected by low IQ voters rom their state, { respectively }…..east coast, & Calofornication/West Coast “enemies: Washington State Et Al!
“Lizzy Warren”, is a communist in Socialist clothing! her ideas are stolen from “other” socialists, brainwashed College professors, etc! She would have you think she has the answer for America’s future success in the world…..{ No Way}…..Same old bath House Barry, & *Demoncrat* party rhetoric…..None of which our forefathers intended for this country to suffer under! Nepotism, greed, corruption, lack of substance, & no soul…..Elected by low IQ voters rom their state, { respectively }…..east coast, & Calofornication/West Coast “enemies: Washington State Et Al!