Obama says you wouldn’t succeed without government, so you’re welcome.

I grew up in and around Ann Arbor. It is, essentially, where old hippies go once they can no longer avoid the fact that they’ve amassed huge sums of wealth, and spend the declining years of their lives running Buddhist book stores and outlawing Coca-Cola for being “too Zionist.” Reality rarely touches that place, and when it does, it is quietly beaten to submission by an ethnic drum circle.

I even once had the privilege of seeing Barack Obama speak there. It was a fascinating experience, sitting there in the pouring rain while the man lectured his audience on “toning down the rhetoric” right before launching into a protracted rant about Fox News and Glenn Beck. I, for one, felt enlightened. And then I realized that I was in the middle of Ann Arbor surrounded by hippies with unlimited bank accounts and a law that lets them grow up to four pot plants at a time.

Today ‘s campaign speech at the University of Michigan was far from disappointing. Within the span of an hour, we learned that not only is it impossible to succeed without the help of government, but when student signed on the dotted line for their loans, they were really sending the bill directly to American millionaires. Which I’m sure the millionaires will be happy to know.

But, of course, in case you were wondering, none of you have ever been nor will ever be successful without a warm embrace from the loving arms of the federal government. Its just impossible. No one has ever done anything without a big sloppy kiss of entitlement.

“We do not begrudge wealth in this country. I want everybody here to do well. We aspire to financial success, but we also understand that we’re not successful just by ourselves,” President Obama said at a campaign event in Ann Arbor, Michigan on Friday morning.

“We’re successful because somebody started the University of Michigan. We’re successful because somebody made an investment in all the federal research labs that created the internet. We’re successful because we have an outstanding military that costs money. We’re successful because somebody built roads and bridges. And laid broadband lines and these things didn’t just happen on their own. And if we all understand that we’ve got to pay for this stuff, it makes sense for those of us who’ve done best to do our fair share and to try to pass off that bill on to somebody else, that’s not right. That’s not who we are,” he said.

It was awful when Elizabeth Warren said it, but its just horrendous now, and unconsciously, Obama is belying what appears to be a second grade understanding of the roll of government (which isn’t surprising considering his grasp of economics appears to be limited to “the movement of stuff by people”). State governments built roads and broadband lines and roads and bridges and highway rest stops, and, not coincidentally, the University of Michigan, which was established by the governors of the Michigan territory at the time. And last I checked, no one since the 18th century has contended that the government isn’t responsible for defending our borders, though to be fair, they don’t exactly do so effectively (unless you count cutting down on illegal immigration by destroying the American economy as “defense”).

Americans pay taxes so that we don’t get blown up by third world nations with just enough money to make a nuclear bomb. But the government – and particularly the Obama government – likes to spend money on sh*t we don’t need, like owl vomit experiments and bailouts for Wall Street banks and Joe Biden…

And we definitely don’t pay taxes so that a Transsexual Native American Studies/Mixed Media Arts & Poetry major can earn an education is something so f***ing stupid it makes the Chevy Volt look like an award winning idea can pay of the student loans she took out without actually ever earning an honest paycheck.

President Obama offered a plan Friday to reduce the costs of higher education by increasing the amount of federal grant money available in low-interest loans and tying it directly to colleges’ ability to reduce tuition…The administration also is proposing to provide $1 billion in aid to states that curb higher education costs and to create a competition that provides $55 million in start-up funding for higher education institutions to pursue innovation to boost productivity.

That’s all fabulously amazing, except that he’s looking to tax “millionaires” to pay for the billions in aid he’d like to send to states to subsidize education so that student fees don’t go up. Which means that we will be paying more of the students’ share of the cost, while colleges, who are not under any obligation to reduce spending or submit to educational effectiveness assessments still earn the same amount of money. I mean, it makes sense: how else are the reliable voting bloc of university professors supposed to afford their subscriptions to The Nation and their thousand dollar campaign dinner tickets if they’re working at Barnes & Noble in the nonfiction section giving bad advice to well-meaning book seekers? But really. If I’m going to pay for someone’s education, it’ll either be my own, or someone who is pursuing a useful skill, like teaching children Chinese for when our overlords finally conquer us.