“If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

Barack Obama

Krauthammer leads off the article with the statement above. With inept fodder like this fed to him directly by Obama he doesn't need to know the difference between left and right.

"you didn’t build that"

"That" is referring to infrastructure, not the business. This is not really an example of stupidity on the part of Obama, but of dishonesty and/or incompetence on the part of columnists and editors who pretend to interpret the sentence in a way that was clearly not intended.

It its very difficult to orate in such a way that that the opposition can't clip away the context. While that Obama quote was ineptly phrased, and maybe scored a temporary point for the Myth Robme team, MR has real problems (and has said quite a few more such ineptitudes himself)

Most of the left (as well as the right, of course) also supports massive redistribution of wealth (largely upwards, towards the wealthy) in the form of 10-20% of GDP to landowners for doing nothing.

The real issue is whether the goal is to steer the economy in a direction that will allow the benefits of growth to be broadly shared or whether to structure the economy in a way that directs income upward.

You're leaving out stuff about efficiency: rent collection is inefficient, and it predominantly serves the wealthy.

You didn’t build that...

Actually, the saddest part of this whole episode is that most people miss something at least as important: No one built that... 10-20% of GDP is land rent, and no one built the land. Of course, the value of the land is created by the activities of government and the community (even by people long dead), and that value is captured by landowners (again, in exchange for nothing).

sure we progressives think less military spending, more regulation of wallstreet, control of the outsourcing of jobs, & more keynesian federal spending would have been a damn good start. of course the right thinks the exact opposite. it's all academic anyway. obama has shown the rhetoric he used in 2008 & today is all hot air anyway. plus even if he didn't compromise away any promising legislation, the right will stop anything he does with their majority of wingnut republicans & blue dog democrats, along with the ever present possibility of a filibuster. so whether or not you want to admit it, our system of government is so broken it cannot be repaired. so with a nuclear war a distinct probablity within a decade or less, if we manage to be extremely lucky & avoid it, we still face 2 unsolvable challenges: 1. global warming. as you may know an iceberg 4 times as large as manhattan broke off from the greenland icesheet. there's an underground river in anarctica. even if we stopped releashing greenhouse gases now, we've already reached the point of no return. 2. russia, china, brazil, india & south africa are setting up trade between themselves which will bypass the dollar as world's currency. china is setting up the same policy with japan. what this will do is sink the dollar. even without all this bad news, the people that have lost their homes, lost their jobs, are in heavy debt; they will never recover, they just cannot be made whole again ever. it's a real shitty deal.

Once again, we find Gross Generalizations about People & the Gross Dichotomization of Topics from a Blowh...Pundit . Complete Rubbish.

Chalres or his source forgot the preceding 20 seconds of content of the Obama speech. Obviously the word "that" in the paused phrase, "If you've got a business....you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKjPI6no5ng&feature=related

Sorry, but the link didn't take in full. I hope this try will do it. It is worth hearing the entire, though brief, content of the speech adding context to the disputed phrase.