Link to original article. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-insiders/post/krauthammers-de-tocquevillian-vision-of-america/2012/07/20/gJQATRHwxW_blog.html)

"Charles Krauthammer today has one of the most succinct and coherent critiques of Barack Obama's political philosophy I have read. He argues that Obama believes that success is not so much a function of individual effort as it is enabled by the collective efforts of the state and social solidarity.

In other words, dissecting some recent, brief and often quoted remarks by the president in which he said that behind most American success stories is a government investment in infrastructure and education, Krauthammer sees a dangerous misunderstanding of the individual drive and spirit that truly accounts for American exceptionalism.

I don't agree with his analysis of Obama; as I have said before, I believe the president accepts the centrality of the private s

Obama believes more in the importance of government investment to spur private investment and that government needs to be a strong referee of the free market.

But what interests me more about Krauthammer's column is not the critique of Obama, but his Tocquevillian vision of America as a land of rugged individuals, buoyed not by government but by their own wits and their ties to family, church and community. "

Obama believes more in the importance of government investment to spur private investment and that government needs to be a strong referee of the free market.


Really? What evidence is there of that? Solyndra? GM? Holding up Keystone? Taking over health care? Protecting Wall Street from the mean 'ol world? Extending unemployment benefits from now to forever? Keep business in a constant state of uncertainty as to the next government regulatory 'spur' to investment and its hidden costs?

This would be laughable if it wasn't so sad and so readily disprovable.

But what interests me more about Krauthammer's column is not the critique of Obama, but his Tocquevillian vision of America as a land of rugged individuals, buoyed not by government but by their own wits and their ties to family, church and community. "

I wonder how many entrepreneurs the author knows? I wonder how many the president knows? Without fail, every successful person I have ever known worked harder, worked smarter, worked harder, worked well with others in their communities, sacrificed more, worked harder (notice a pattern?) than most other people.

Now, I qualify 'success' not as a person who is politically connected and has stuff handed to them.

There is a great quote and I don't recall the author but, this is the gist;

"Successful people spend part of their lives doing things most others won't so they can spend the rest of their lives doing things most others can't."

Obama and, I suspect, the author, have little real world experience with people outside of 'success' in government and, when you look at the business leaders they typically work with, people like Immelt of GM and others, they're not exactly folks who have a clue what it is like to start something from scratch or have the remotest idea of what it is like to struggle to make payroll and pay the bills.

America wasn't built buy giant corporations or government. Both of those things were built off the backs of we, the people. We came first. We built first and both of those entities, have little regard for the unwashed masses.
To them, it's all Wall Street. Not Main Street.

Obama may believe it [ I really doubt it - except to control business - pick winners and losers] but that is NOT the Role of Gov.


Gov my fund military or space programs, where the developed tech has multiple uses - like the Internet - developed to provide a redundant - self healing cabled communication network in the event of a loss of major portions of the network - originally joining the research centers at universities ....

[B]ARPANET deployed (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET)

The initial ARPANET consisted of four IMPs:

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where Leonard Kleinrock had established a Network Measurement Center, with an SDS Sigma 7 being the first computer attached to it;
The Stanford Research Institute's Augmentation Research Center, where Douglas Engelbart had created the ground-breaking NLS system, a very important early hypertext system (with the SDS 940 that ran NLS, named "Genie", being the first host attached);
University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), with the Culler-Fried Interactive Mathematics Center's IBM 360/75, running OS/MVT being the machine attached;
The University of Utah's Computer Science Department, where Ivan Sutherland had moved, running a DEC PDP-10 running TENEX.



Arpanet led to NSFnet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSFNet) [National Science Foundation NET]


Commercial traffic

The NSF's appropriations act authorized NSF to "foster and support the development and use of computer and other scientific and engineering methods and technologies, primarily for research and education in the sciences and engineering." This allowed NSF to support NSFNET and related networking initiatives, but only to the extent that that support was "primarily for research and education in the sciences and engineering."[18] And this in turn was taken to mean that use of NSFNET for commercial purposes was not allowed.

Commercial ISPs, ANS CO+RE, and the CIX

During the period when NSFNET was being established, Internet service providers that allowed commercial traffic began to emerge, such as Alternet, PSINet, CERFNet, and others. The commercial networks in many cases were interconnected to the NSFNET and routed traffic over the NSFNET nominally accordingly to the NSFNET acceptable use policy[23] Additionally, these early commercial networks often directly interconnected with each other as well as, on a limited basis, with some of the regional Internet networks.

In 1991, the Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX, pronounced "kicks") was created by PSINet, UUNET and CERFnet to provide a location at which multiple networks could exchange traffic free from traffic-based settlements and restrictions imposed by an acceptable use policy.[24]

In 1991 a new ISP, ANS CO+RE (commercial plus research), raised concerns and unique questions regarding commercial and non-commercial interoperability policies. ANS CO+RE was the for-profit subsidiary of the non-profit Advanced Network and Services (ANS) that had been created earlier by the NSFNET partners, Merit, IBM, and MCI.[25] ANS CO+RE was created specifically to allow commercial traffic on ANSNet without jeopardizing its parent's non-profit status or violating any tax laws. The NSFNET Backbone Service and ANS CO+RE both used and shared the common ANSNet infrastructure. NSF agreed to allow ANS CO+RE to carry commercial traffic subject to several conditions:

that the NSFNET Backbone Service was not diminished;
that ANS CO+RE recovered at least the average cost of the commercial traffic traversing the network; and
that any excess revenues recovered above the cost of carrying the commercial traffic would be placed into an infrastructure pool to be distributed by an allocation committee broadly representative of the networking community to enhance and extend national and regional networking infrastructure and support.

For a time ANS CO+RE refused to connect to the CIX and the CIX refused to purchase a connection to ANS CO+RE. In May 1992 Mitch Kapor and Al Weis forged an agreement where ANS would connect to the CIX as a "trial" with the ability to disconnect at a moment's notice and without the need to join the CIX as a member.[26] This compromise resolved things for a time, but later the CIX started to block access from regional networks that had not paid the $10,000 fee to become members of the CIX.[27]

Privatization and a new network architecture

The NSFNET Backbone Service was primarily used by academic and educational entities, and was a transitional network bridging the era of the ARPANET and CSNET into the modern Internet of today.

On April 30, 1995, the NSFNET Backbone Service had been successfully transitioned to a new architecture[28] and the NSFNET backbone was decommissioned.[29] At this point there were still NSFNET programs, but there was no longer an NSFNET network or network service.
NSF's very high speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS)

After the transition, network traffic was carried on any of several commercial backbone networks, internetMCI, PSINet, SprintLink, ANSNet, and others. Traffic between networks was exchanged at four Network Access Points or NAPs. The NAPs were located in New York (actually New Jersey), Washington, D.C., Chicago, and San Jose and run by Sprint, MFS Datanet, Ameritech, and Pacific Bell.[30] The NAPs were the forerunners of modern Internet exchange points.

The former NSFNET regional networks could connect to any of the new backbone networks or directly to the NAPs, but in either case they would need to pay for their own connections. NSF provided some funding for the NAPs and interim funding to help the regional networks make the transition, but did not fund the new backbone networks directly.

To help ensure the stability of the Internet during and immediately after the transition from NSFNET, NSF conducted a solicitation to select a Routing Arbiter (RA) and ultimately made a joint award to the Merit Network and USC's Information Science Institute to act as the RA.

To continue its promotion of advanced networking technology the NSF conducted a solicitation to create a very high-speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS) that, like NSFNET before it, would focus on providing service to the research and education community. MCI won this award and created a 155 M-bit/sec (OC3c) and later a 622 M-bit/sec (OC12c) and 2.5 G-bit/sec (OC48c) ATM network to carry TCP/IP traffic primarily between the supercomputing centers and their users. NSF support[31] was available to organizations that could demonstrate a need for very high speed networking capabilities and wished to connect to the vBNS or to the Abilene Network, the high speed network operated by the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID, aka Internet2).[32]

At the February 1994 regional techs meeting in San Diego, the group revised its charter[33] to include a broader base of network service providers, and subsequently adopted North American Network Operators' Group (NANOG) as its new name. Elise Gerich and Mark Knopper were the founders of NANOG and its first coordinators, followed by Bill Norton, Craig Labovitz, and Susan Harris.[34]


there was also CSNet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSNET) -

The Computer Science Network (CSNET) was a computer network that began operation in 1981 in the United States.[1] Its purpose was to extend networking benefits, for computer science departments at academic and research institutions that could not be directly connected to ARPANET, due to funding or authorization limitations. It played a significant role in spreading awareness of, and access to, national networking and was a major milestone on the path to development of the global Internet. CSNET was funded by the National Science Foundation for an initial three-year period from 1981 to 1984.


NONE of this was funded for Commercial Purposes ...... NONE - it was spelled out in the appropriations ........

Obama believes more in the importance of government investment to spur private investment and that government needs to be a strong referee of the free market.

But what interests me more about Krauthammer's column is not the critique of Obama, but his Tocquevillian vision of America as a land of rugged individuals, buoyed not by government but by their own wits and their ties to family, church and community. "

What was the government's role when the venture capatilist William Durant used the profits from the Durant-Dort Carriage Company to purchase controlling interests in several fledgling car manufacturing businesses?

We all know that Obama thought it was the government's role to pervert the bankruptcy process to ensure the continuation of union dues into the democrats election funds :lol:

NONE of this was funded for Commercial Purposes ...... NONE - it was spelled out in the appropriations ........

Not to toot my own horn, but I've said this too. In fact, I think it's so obvious it almost doesn't require repeating - none of the innovations even partly attributable to government ever had the intent of enhancing commerce. (In fact, THAT was probably the part of Obama's remark that annoyed me the most).

We built the bomb not so we could build Calvert Cliffs. We did it to win a war. And we used it to end a war and tell the rest of the world, leave us the f*** alone or we'll erase your ass.

We went into space for one reason - to get there ahead of the Russians. We couldn't afford for the Russians to get there, plant their flag in orbit and rain down holy fire on us - we needed to be there first. We didn't do it to provide Cochlear implants and Dustbusters.

Even big corporations like Bell Labs didn't invent things like the laser or the transistor so we all could have eye surgery and iPods. Entrepreneurs do that.

We built the bomb not so we could build Calvert Cliffs. We did it to win a war. And we used it to end a war and tell the rest of the world, leave us the f*** alone or we'll erase your ass.




there was an 'Atoms for Peace' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atoms_for_Peace) program that followed ........

we built the bomb to see if it was possible, then decided to drop 2 on Japan