Read the passage and answer the questions that follow :

To say that all individuals are embedded in and the product of society is banal. Obama rises above
banality by means of fallacy: equating society with government, the collectivity with the state. Of
course we are shaped by our milieu. But the most formative, most important influence on the
individual is not government. It is civil society, those elements of the collectivity that lie outside
government: family, neighborhood, church, Rotary club, PTA, the voluntary associations that
Tocqueville understood to be the genius of America and source of its energy and freedom. Moreover,
the greatest threat to a robust, autonomous civil society is the ever-growing Leviathan state and those
like Obama whosee it as the ultimate expression of the collective. Obama compounds the fallacy by
declaring the state to be the font of entrepreneurial success. How so? It created the infrastructure—
roads, bridges, schools, Internet—off which we all thrive. Absurd. We don’t credit the Swiss postal
service with the Special Theory of Relativity because it transmitted Einstein’s manuscript to the
Annalen der Physik. Everyone drives the roads, goes to school, uses the mails. So did Steve Jobs. Yet
only he created the Mac and the iPad.

Obama’s infrastructure argument is easily refuted by what is essentially a controlled social
experiment. Roads and schools are the constant. What’s variable is the energy, enterprise, risk-taking,
hard work and genius of the individual. It is therefore precisely those individual characteristics, not the
communal utilities that account for the different outcomes. The ultimate Obama fallacy, however, is
the conceit that belief in the value of infrastructure—and willingness to invest in its creation and
maintenance—is what divides liberals from conservatives.

More nonsense.Infrastructure is not a liberal idea, noris it particularly new. The Via Appia was built
2,300 years ago. The Romans built aqueducts, too. And sewers. Since forever, infrastructure has been
consensually understood to be a core function of government. The argument between left and right is
about what you do beyond infrastructure. It’s about transfer payments and redistributionist taxation,
about geometrically expanding entitlements, about tax breaks and subsidies to induce actions pleasing
to central planners. It’s about free contraceptives for privileged students and welfare without work—
the latest Obama entitlement-by-decree that would fatally undermine the great bipartisan welfare
reform of 1996.

What divides liberals and conservatives is not roads and bridges but Julia’s world, an Obama
campaign creation that may be the most self-revealing parody of liberalism ever conceived. It’s a
series of cartoon illustrations in which a functional Julia is swaddled and subsidized throughout her
life by an all-giving government of bottomless pockets and “Queen for a Day” magnanimity. At every
stage, the state is there to provide—preschool classes and cut-rate college loans, birth control and
maternity care, business loans and retirement. The only time she’s on her own is at her grave site.
Julia’s world is totally atomized. It contains no friends, no community and, of course, no spouse. Who
needs one? She’s married to the provider state. Or to put it slightly differently, the “Life of Julia”
represents the paradigmatic Obamapolitical philosophy: citizen as orphan child. For the conservative,
providing for every need is the duty that government owes to actual orphan children. Not to
supposedly autonomous adults. Beyond infrastructure, the conservative sees the proper role of
government as providing not European-style universal entitlements but a firm safety net, meaning
Julia-like treatment for those who really cannot make it on their own—those too young or too old, too
mentally or physically impaired, to provide for themselves.

Limited government so conceived has two indispensable advantages. It avoids inexorable European-
style national insolvency. And it avoids breeding debilitating individual dependency. It encourages
and celebrates character, independence, energy, hard work as the foundations of a free society and a
thriving economy—precisely the virtues Obama discounts and devalues in his accounting of the
wealth of nations.