Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren announced on Monday that she has launched an exploratory committee to run for president in 2020.
While Warren is the first of the more prominent Democrat names to take an official step toward running, she is entering a field that is projected to have more than 30 candidates.
Here is how she framed her reasoning for running for president: “We can make our democracy work for all of us. We can make our economy work for all of us. We can rebuild America’s middle class, but this time, we’ve got to build it for everyone. No matter where you live in America and no matter where your family came from in the world, you deserve a path to opportunity, because no matter what our differences, most of us want the same thing — to be able to work hard, play by the same set of rules and take care of the people we love.”
Most of that is platitudinal and doesn’t sound very ominous, but what exactly does it mean to her?
How do we, in her mind, “make democracy and economy work for all of us”?
What does she mean by “rebuilding America’s middle class” or everyone deserving “a path to opportunity” or “playing by the same set of rules”?
To get a better understanding of Warren’s view of the world and America, particularly in a socio-economic sense, we go to a 2011 speech that she gave to a group of citizens in her home state of Mass. as she was running for Senate.
Here is what she had to say:
The premise that no one gets rich on his own is an obvious one to which no sensible person would ever disagree. The issue is with what she believes is responsible for great success through what she calls the “underlying social contract.”
The
She says the business could not be created without roads, bridges, police forces and other government entities. But she misses an important point — in America, we do not look at the world through government and non-government; we instead look at America as a haven of creators and entrepreneurs who lead the world.
She says a successful business couldn’t have been possible without a road, but what was the road before it was a road?
God created the land where the road is, not government.
What was an entrepreneur before he or she was a person?
God created the person, not government.
Government’s job is not — and should never be — creating (or having a hand in the creation of) anything in the private sector. Its job is to create an environment conducive for private competition, using regulation only if absolutely necessary.
To imply that someone created a Fortune 500 business because a road was there is akin to saying a football player was able to score a touchdown because a
What she said reeks of something her former boss, President Obama, said during his
The United States is a nation created by men who had a lot of ingenuity, just as the hypothetical factory creator in Warren’s analogy does. The founders of this nation knew from previous experience that government is not set up to create. That is why they wrote the Constitution with limits on the amount government can do.
Warren asserts that the small business creator owes the government and the rest of society, rather than society being grateful to that person or entity for providing top-notch goods or services and jobs for many.
The United States is the greatest nation in the history of the world. Government did not make it great. People who had ingenuity and a passion to create did.
