**Bumped Up From TAM Wire, posted by Patricia**
The DBs compulsion to confess? “Look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart.”
That sound you hear is silence—as millions of small business owners and entrepreneurs were left speechless this weekend from President Obama’s latest insult.
The slap in the face to hard-working Americans conveyed Obama’s belief that it takes a village—a heavily subsidized village—to create that venture you’re profiting from:
“Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
Obama pushed his policy goals of infrastructure (aka stimulus) spending and “government research” as part of a collectivist utopia “doing things together.” It’s simply stunning that he would tell Americans, “If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that.”
After all, could individuals be resourceful and hard-working enough to create whole new enterprises? Obama said:
“Look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart.”
It is this view of successful businesses—essentially, “You owe us”—that drives Obama’s continued attacks on the country’s job creators in the form of tax hikes and regulations…
Thanks goodness (because you can never tell these days), the response has been rapid and critical.
Business groups criticize Obama over remarks about government’s role in success
Prominent business groups are joining conservatives and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in calling out President Obama for his recent comments about the relationship between government and business.
The president made the comments Friday during a speech to supporters in Roanoke, Va. Arguing that successful business owners got help from others along the way and suggesting they should pay more in taxes in return, he noted how government often provides the infrastructure needed for success. “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that,” Obama said. “Somebody else made that happen.”
David Chavern, chief operating officer of the Chamber of Commerce, accused Obama of slighting the remarkable achievements of extraordinary individuals.
“We should applaud the risk-takers and the dreamers who are willing to stand out from the crowd,” Chavern said in a Chamber blog. “Rather than denigrate what these people have done, we need to encourage more people to be like them.”
The National Federation of Independent Business said the president’s “unfortunate remarks over the weekend show an utter lack of understanding and appreciation for the people who take a huge personal risk and work endless hours to start a business and create jobs.”
“I’m sure every small-business owner who took a second mortgage on their home, maxed out their credit cards or borrowed money from their own retirement savings to start their business disagrees strongly with President Obama’s claim. They know that hard work does matter,” the group also said.
Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul told FoxNews.com on Monday that the remarks “reflect just how unqualified he is to lead us to a real economic recovery.”
It’s one thing for your minister to remind you that you are not alone; that you survive by grace of God, and by cooperation with your fellows. Save us from pride, which will surely bring us down. Touch our hearts with humility.
HOWEVER…when a political leader says these things, it’s not for the purpose of touching our hearts and urging us to become better human beings; it’s for the purpose of justifying coercive acts that will, when all is said and done, seize the wealth of his political opponents and deliver it into the grasping hands of his cronies. As they said in “All the President’s Men”: “Follow the money.”
I’ve been shafted and abused by people of wealth and power. I could tell some stories about excesses of the inappropriately-rich. I’ve got my gripes. Don’t we all? But I’m not going to let some politician use my gripes as a tool to push my buttons so I’ll beg for an all-powerful central authority. Big Brother is not the answer.
It’s becoming a cliche to repeat this, but Obama is all about class warfare. This is the politics of envy. It’s a self-serving attempt to pry us away from the Biblical admonition: “Thou shalt not covet.”
Life has taught me the wisdom of this Commandment. I can get along with people, or I can envy them. But I can’t do both.
I just got caught up on DB news after taking a trip overseas. I was in Russia for 3 days and all i heard was how great capitalism is working in their communities. The people are prospering and living lives they only could dream of under Communism. The ravages of Communism are still evident. i saw a tshirt with Lenin on one side crossed out and the other side a picture of McDonalds and smiling faces.
I come back to this fool telling Americans that the government is responsible for their successes.
My impression from listening to the audio of this is he got started saying, “If you’ve got a business,” but then he went back to his former thought about infrastructure, meaning to say, “You didn’t build that.” My impression is he was really trying to make the point that despite the fact that you built your own business, you didn’t build the infrastructure that supported it. Fair enough, though he made some other comments that I thought were totally off-base, diminishing the accomplishments of businesspeople, saying he’s amazed that people think they got where they are, “because they’re so smart.” That drips with condescension.
However, I at least understand where this argument that “businesses owe a debt to their communities” is coming from. It’s what I believed 15 years ago. It’s the idea that communities around the country invested time and money to support these companies and those companies owe an obligation to support the communities that supported them. This is what Elizabeth Warren was saying a couple years ago, and she continues to harp on it. The way I see it now, though, is that the Democrats have this mostly backwards, because it’s unrealistic. What else is new?
The only area where I would agree with Obama is where he says, “You didn’t build the internet.” That’s true. The internet began as a government project, and was only later privatized, and it has lead to a great deal of wealth generation. It’s unlikely it would’ve done so if it began in the private sector, due to the capital investment necessary to get it going, and the incentive for any company that would’ve been involved in that to want to hold on to potential profits from the intellectual property. However, it’s also true to say that the private sector built most of what now runs on the internet, and is the reason so many people find it so useful. The internet as it existed under the government’s tutelage was very useful to university scientists, but most people would’ve walked away from it, leaving its potential unrealized, since you had to know quite a bit of technical information, and use cryptic commands to use it. This was before the advent of the web, which simplified using the internet greatly. Some would rightly say it was simplified *too much*.
Where Obama and Warren have it backwards is that the reason cities and states were able to build out the infrastructure they have (or had) as much as they did was due to the wealth generated by the companies that came into their communities. They didn’t have that wealth on their own. It had to be generated by corporations in their midst. They each depend on each other, but one flows from the other. Infrastructure is not just for the benefit of businesses, but for everybody’s benefit, whether they work for those companies or not. It does not represent a debt that the corporations owe those cities and states. Rather those communities can thank the corporations that came in their midst for helping to finance those projects. They would have been impossible without their presence.
The rub is when production requirements imposed on those corporations become too onerous, they will find it necessary to leave those places. This is what they’ve done, and those places have noticed that loss. They have found it harder to maintain the infrastructure they have as a result. It’s important to keep cause and effect straight when diagnosing what’s gone wrong.
Businesses leaving and Barry telling us we can ONLY succeed in collectivist utopia, this is almost right out of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.” Barry doesn’t have the SLIGHTEST clue what makes businesses succeed, and tells everyone at every opportunity that Government’s The One through which we live, move, and have our being. I swear to God, that chick had a crystal ball.
somewhere, tammy bruce’s head is exploding on this one. i know mine is!
btw, having serious tammy bruce withdrawal symptoms! when is she back?!?!
Tammy’s back Monday 7/23 🙂
A good point that Glenn Beck reminded me about is that statistically most businesses fail. This gets to Obama’s weakness in understanding how the economy works. If his logic were to hold up, and business success was largely due to public infrastructure “and the help of others,” then most business start-ups would succeed. They don’t. There is something special about success in business. Yes, good infrastructure is a necessity for it, but you cannot draw a straight line from good infrastructure to business success.
Addressing Obama’s second point about education, there have been plenty of successful business people who were not successful in school (and likewise, there have been plenty who were also successful in academia). This is not a determinant in business success. As best I can tell, success in business really requires experience. It can be taught, but the best teaching for it is “on the job training,” not sitting in a classroom and reading case studies. Again, education can help. In some cases it can help a lot if it’s oriented to helping students think beyond their common sense, everyday understanding of the world. I’m not saying it’s unnecessary, but Obama’s point is that society’s public institutions are the sole determining factors for American business success. The evidence does not support that.
It’s true that government can work with business for the good of the country. That’s why we need to get a leftist president out of office.
While I’m not a business owner I do know a little bit about hard work and success. I was kicked out of high school in the 10th grade for basically being an idiot. From 14 to 17 I leaved on the streets or where ever I could rack out. At 17 I joined the US Army and everyone said I’d get kicked out, that I couldn’t make it. Just under 21 years later I had achieved the third highest enlisted rank of Sargent First Class. I retired when I was ordered to go to Korea which would have been the third time away from my family and couldn’t handle that again. Now I work for a manufacturing company running two departments. This is a great country and I don’t think I would have been given these opportunities anywhere else. God Bless and protect America.