Progressives were in a tizzy after Barack Obama let slip their foundational philosophy that the individual is meaningless, accomplishes nothing on his own and only exists to feed an ever-growing government ruled by elitist busybodies. They applauded his speech at first before realizing the dire consequences such revelations would produce.

Their first defense was to try and reconstruct what he said, in a way he did not say it. They tried to transfer the meaning of “you didn’t build that” from a business to previously mentioned roads and bridges in the same passage. However, grammar problems got in the way. There’s a problem with the antecedent and also the fact of “that” being used in the singular while roads and bridges are plural. Had Obama used the word “those” instead of that perhaps the charade would have worked.

English structure being what it is left them lacking. Either the smartest guy in the room is incapable of properly structuring a sentence or he accidentally revealed the liberal’s mantra of hatred toward business and independent self-sufficient individuals for all to see.

Caught by irrefutable grammar, they are now retreating to the original dogma and desperately trying to rationalize their untenable position. America is not amused.

While roads, bridges and that once in a lifetime brush with a great teacher are certainly helpful, in the grand scheme of things they are ultimately rendered unimportant. Having a bounty of those things does not portend in any way future success or accomplishment.

Consider North Korea. Plenty of roads, bridges and good teachers but the country is hopelessly backward and the people are starving. Consider Cuba. Again there are plenty of roads, bridges and teachers but the country is hopelessly stuck in the 1950s (the fishing is spectacular though, since local citizens are not allowed to own boats).

The Berlin Wall is another striking example. On the free side there was commerce and prosperity. Behind the Iron Curtain there were endless shortages, low standards of living and virtually no prosperity for anyone. Both sides had governments but only one side had freedom.

Look all around the world if you like. What you’ll discover is roads, bridges, teachers and the collective wisdom of a collective government won’t get you very far.

Countries that have grown and prospered have roads, bridges and teachers too. But they have some added benefits that backward countries don’t have – freedom, self-reliance, personal responsibility, the free market, liberty, the ability to succeed and fail on their own.

While the government collective loved by elitist liberals seems compelling in the short run, its long run consequences have always resulted in disaster and failure. History has proven that time and time again.

Europe fell into that trap after World War II. They were so impressed by the government’s war effort that they ceded health care and a host of other functions to government control after the war.

But there’s a big difference between military leaders and bureaucrats compared to governmental ones. The military man’s job is to kill people and break things to the point that the enemy is vanquished and the military leader and bureaucrat’s services are no longer needed. A government man works hard to make sure his job never ends, no matter how unnecessary it ultimately becomes. Left to grow unchecked, all governments end up morphing into a pointless maze of circular redundancies, swallowing a nation’s resources to the point of economic strangulation.

Piece by piece, nations in Europe are slowly dismantling their national health care systems and moving toward a free market – the exact opposite of where this country is headed under Obama.

Equality and fairness, the utopian dream of progressive liberals, is the direct enemy of liberty and freedom. That’s a simple fact of life elitists seem unable to comprehend.

Citizens in North Korea have fairness and equality on a grand scale – and all the misery that goes with it.

Obama also alluded to the government being responsible for the Internet, an urban myth that will not die. Robert Taylor, the former director of Arpanet, pointed out in a 2004 letter that Arpanet was not an internet – it was not a means of connecting independent computer networks. Arpanet is often confused as the original Internet or a governmental forerunner to the Internet. It was not.

That distinction, along with most of the advances in modern computing, belongs to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) where Ethernet and eventually connections to computer networks actually was invented in the 1970s.

The Internet exploded commercially after the only governmental agency responsible for a small transmission piece of it unplugged itself and the free market took over in 1995.

The bottom line of Obama’s rant is how self-revealing it is.

If there’s one man in America that illustrates complete and total unearned success, that man is Barack Obama.

Allan Von Werder is the publisher of The Daily Review (Morgan City), Franklin Banner Tribune and The Bayou Journal (Pierre Part).