The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.

Warren Wages War
Lefties love Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard law scholar seeking the Democratic nomination to challenge Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts. The hard-left outfit MoveOn.org has been promoting a quote of hers defending President Obama’s anti-business attitudes:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there–good for you!

But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that maurauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory. . . .

Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea–God bless! Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

Reader Brent Amos offers a rejoinder [response]:

What amazes me is how so many people linking this quote celebrate the sheer ignorance of it. People who build factories pay a variety of fees that also pay for roads, schools and many other things. Just a few fees in my locale are Building Plan Check and Permit Fee, Transportation Impact Fee, Parks Development Fee, School Impact Fee, Service Impact Fee (for police and fire), Treatment Plant Connection Capacity Charge, Trunk Line Capacity Charge, and any number of special fees depending on the nature of the building. These aren’t fees for a factory necessarily, these are fees to build anything. Then for the life of the building there will be ongoing assessments (taxes) by the city and county that will be used to pay for city and county services and roads. The fee schedule for my city alone is 28 pages long.

Someone who builds something pays his fair share, especially here n California. Moreover, someone with the wherewithal to build in California has paid taxes on his (probably larger than average) personal income and residence. That developer also paid the salaries for the construction workers and then the employees that worked in the building who in turn paid income tax, sales tax, and if a homeowner, real estate tax.

Yes, almost everyone pays for roads, police and fire, but a developer has paid far more for such things than the average citizen. How much worse off would a community be that didn’t have someone to build buildings and pay employees that then pay taxes? It isn’t very hard to find communities that are dead or dying because they couldn’t find businesses to locate there. The liberal myth that businesses don’t pay their fair share is what drives those businesses to other states or countries.

And what’s with the crack about “marauding bands”? Does Ms. Warren honestly believe that is a realistic problem in the U.S.? This isn’t Europe.

Indeed. Warren’s obnoxious quote is supposed to rebut those who accuse the left of engaging in class warfare. Instead, by dividing America into businessmen and “the rest of us,” and portraying the former as freeloaders at the expense of the latter, she proves they are absolutely right.

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