A winnable argument

Mark Warren (Esquire): "After two years during which a significant number of Americans — and those representing them in Congress — have come to espouse the dim-witted view that such a notion [the value of the common good] is tantamount to Marxism, that any spending of public coin is 'socialism,' and that any taxation is state theft, it was bracing that the president felt necessary to offer a fundamental corrective to this ahistoric nonsense and remind his countrymen that the United States became a world-historic economic power in the first place because of its willingness to invest in its people and its institutions — investments in human capital that lifted hundreds of millions of people from abject poverty and suffering and helped create the American middle class, the greatest economic engine the world has ever known. I would call this the greatest return on investment in history. In the current political climate, others would say that it was not the proper role of government to be making these investments, and that it was all a waste of money. I like my chances in that argument."