Columns

Convention II

LEN TRIA, Uncommon Sense
Published: September 5, 2012

Election fervor is upon us in full battle mode. The Democratic Party is in Charlotte, N.C., doing what the Republican Party did in Tampa and that is spending huge amounts of money to convince voters to vote their party in November.

That's the American way and has been so for generations as each party hopes to connect with those voters who have not yet made up their minds. We know that the majority of voters have already decided who they are going to cast their ballot for come Nov. 6.

However, there are enough undecided voters left that could and probably will decide this year's presidential race. I am hoping that enough people watch the Charlotte show because tonight Elizabeth Warren, who is running for the Senate in Massachusetts, will give a keynote address.

People should watch and see the kind of mentality that drives the hard left liberals, who now want to be called progressives, and how they view the United States. If you don't realize it or didn't know she was the original one to utter "you didn't build your business …someone else did."

Of course she and the President have built nothing so it is easy for them to disparage those entrepreneurs who did build their businesses and provided jobs for countless millions of Americans.

Some have tried to argue that the President and Warren were talking about infrastructure others (government) provided that made success possible. They forget that the infrastructure in this country was paid for by the people and not government.

Government does a good job of taking people's money and then spending it as they please. So the argument that it was because of the government falls flat as it was again the people who made things possible. I wonder what people like Henry Ford and Steve Jobs would have to say about Ms. Warren's attacks on the free enterprise system or hundreds of others from great and small businesses that labored long and hard to achieve success.

Then there are the thousands who also tried to achieve with a new idea or invention that didn't make it. Was government responsible for their failure? Maybe in some cases the answer is yes due to the onerous amount of regulation and red tape the government puts in the way.

I don't think you will hear Warren talk about that side of big and intrusive government. She of course is part of academia that believes collectivism aka socialism is the way to go. Of course they have no really good examples but insist that they can do the same worn out premises and come out with a different outcome.

Somebody defined insanity as trying to do something over and over and expecting a different result. Well, the Russians tried for seventy five years to perfect their "collectivism" and as usual in ended in the complete collapse of the Soviet Union.

The problem is Ms. Warren your ideas are old, tired and failed and have never improved the lives of the people under "collectivism" and the free market "capitalism" has built the freest and most prosperous country in the history of mankind.

Len Tria, a regular columnist for Hernando Today, lives in Spring Hill and is a former Hernando County commissioner.