What Do Democrats Have Against Individual Achievement?

The President recently reached into the Elizabeth Warren campaign manual to inform us that "...I believe in investing in basic research and science because I understand that all these extraordinary companies that are these enormous wealth-generators -- many of them would have never been there;  Google, Facebook would not exist, had it not been for investments that we made as a country in basic science and research."  Warren, as you recall, confidently informed us that "I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever. No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did."  

In each case, lip service is given to the genius of individual achievement while trumpeting the benefits of collective processes.  This is of course, not by accident.  These are the statements of minds shaped by socialism and bathed in the rhetoric of the new left, one in which capitalism is tolerated as a necessary evil to be guided and controlled by wisdom of the State; ever-mindful and all-knowing. 

The logic here is breathtaking, as if the true genius at work was in the accretion and exercise of government power, while groundbreaking advances achieved by individuals are treated as the mundane, predictable results of enlightened policy.