What the Left doesn't get about government

Clint Eastwood addressed the Republican National Convention on Thursday. This meant that the Left had to trash him by showing how he benefited from government tax breaks. A post at Huffington goes into detail. Here is a portion of it:

Film director Clint Eastwood will be cheering on Mitt Romney and his party's "you didn't build that!" message during Thursday night's Republican National Convention festivities.

But there's one small problem: Clint Eastwood didn't build that.

Just like the small business owners who spoke on previous nights at the convention in Tampa, Fla., Eastwood, a hugely successful independent filmmaker, has benefited from generous tax credits to produce his movies all over the world -- the same kinds of film tax credits that Romney signed into law as governor.

Eastwood received a 42 percent tax credit in 2008 after shifting the setting of his movie "Gran Torino" from Minneapolis to Detroit, a city dubbed by The New York Times as "the home of 42 percent tax credits for films made there."

It continues on from there. You get the idea.

So, why do you think that these cities gave such generous tax breaks? Were they falling over themselves to give money to Eastwood (if we define "giving" as "taking a smaller share")? Hardly.

These tax credits exist to attract movie companies. They amount to legal bribes. The reason for this is that movie productions spend a lot of money. They are good for the local economy and they generate more taxes than the credits.

By filming in your city or state, Eastwood is doing you a favor. By spending money and generating taxes he is helping to build the infrastructure that the Left is so proud of.

That is where President Obama got it backwards. He tells successful people, "You didn't build that!" meaning that they took advantage of the infrastructure but that infrastructure didn't just happen. Successful people had to pay taxes to pay for it. Rather than telling them that they are not paying their fair share and taxing them in the name of fairness, he needs to be looking at ways of of making them more productive, even if it means lowering their taxes.

The just don't get this.