{"id":29058,"date":"2012-07-20T05:00:53","date_gmt":"2012-07-20T10:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=29058"},"modified":"2012-07-20T07:28:54","modified_gmt":"2012-07-20T12:28:54","slug":"know-your-place-animals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=29058","title":{"rendered":"Know Your Place, Animals!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This piece is sort of a natural follow-on to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=29023\">yesterday&#8217;s post<\/a> &#8211; all the &#8220;Deep Thoiughts&#8221; about man&#8217;s relationship to government, and the different philosophies liberals and conservatives bring to the table on the subject.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"..\/?cat=117\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" src=\"http:\/\/farm5.static.flickr.com\/4108\/4952020177_a626ccd1ff_m.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"200\" height=\"152\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>But first, a brief digression.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t normally rebroadcast other peoples&#8217; ads &#8211; but this one was just too good not to pick up and run with, just a little bit.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a riff on President Obama&#8217;s &#8220;You didn&#8217;t do it&#8221; scold to entrepreneurs and, by extension, really anyone outside government:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/sNHeTwoy5vI\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"460\" height=\"259\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Nope, nobody paid me to rujn it. Although they sure could.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, this sentiment is pandemic on the left. \u00a0Yesterday Jim Schowalter, Mark Dayton&#8217;s budget director, was at a meeting in Thief River Falls with, among other people, the CEO of Digi-Key. \u00a0You may not have heard of it &#8211; it&#8217;s a privately-owned billion-dollar company based out of Thief River Falls that is one of the biggest success stories and major employers in northwestern Minnesota. \u00a0The company started in the CEO&#8217;s apartment forty-odd years ago &#8211; guy didn&#8217;t even have a garage at the time &#8211; and grew into a billion-dollar operation employing thousands (I have family in the area, so I hear things).<\/p>\n<p>And, according to a report from the scene, Schowalter told the CEO that <em>\u00a0<\/em>without government, he could never have done it<\/p>\n<p>The theory among lefties is that without all the &#8220;infraastructure&#8221; government &#8220;provides&#8221;, entrepreneurs would be huddled in caves, helpless, banging rocks together to try to get fire. \u00a0It&#8217;s only through the nurturing hand of government that any human activity is possible.<\/p>\n<p>But once government &#8211; at some level &#8211; has dealt with banditry, brigandry, barratry, piracy and piracy, really, you&#8217;re into the mundanities of laws, roads and regulations. \u00a0 And when those are the subjects&#8230;:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>What? \u00a0Government wants a cookie for doing what it was set up to do, and for which generations of people before the entrepreneur paid taxes &#8211; sometimes grossly overpaid in taxes &#8211; to get?<\/li>\n<li>By the way, where do people suggest the money to build that &#8220;infrastructure&#8221; came from? \u00a0Brought down from heaven on the backs of unicorns? \u00a0No &#8211; people, entrepreneurs and company guys and executives and high school kids working at Tastee Freez and trust fund billionaires alike &#8211; had it taken out of their paychecks.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So yeah, government &#8211; good job and all, &#8220;providing&#8221; things that <em>I and millions like me paid you to do<\/em>. \u00a0Isn&#8217;t that like me going to my boss and saying &#8220;thank me for the design I handed off, <em>on top of <\/em>paying me to do it?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>By the way &#8211; try as I may, I can not find a single reference to this episode anywhere in the mainstream media.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This piece is sort of a natural follow-on to yesterday&#8217;s post &#8211; all the &#8220;Deep Thoiughts&#8221; about man&#8217;s relationship to government, and the different philosophies liberals and conservatives bring to the table on the subject. But first, a brief digression. I don&#8217;t normally rebroadcast other peoples&#8217; ads &#8211; but this one was just too good [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[117,51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dayton-dustbowl","category-liberal-tyranny"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29058"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29058\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29064,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29058\/revisions\/29064"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}