The Effrontery of "You Did Not Build That"

Here is the President, telling entrepreneurs that they didn't build their business on their own.



The full text, so that we are not taking this out of context.

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I am always struck by people who think, “It must be because I was just so smart.” There are a lot of smart people out there. “It must be because I worked harder than everybody else.” Let me tell you something: There are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. If you are successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. 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 did not build that–somebody else made that happen. The Internet did not get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off of the Internet. The point is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.

Where to start? This is rich, of course, coming from a guy who didn't build a thing, who didn't even get decent grades in college for all we know. But the outrage is really about his tone of arrogance in telling us that unless we support his big fat welfare state, we are being ungrateful to our third grade teacher. Entrepreneurs know who helped them and they already said thanks. And all of us know that some government is necessary. We know that government establishing a rule of law, including contract law, and preventing corruption are key features that allow business to succeed. We wouldn't mind paying for government that was limited, small and worked; a government that stayed within its constitutional boundaries and its means.

• We wouldn't mind paying taxes if they actually built roads and dams. But as Mark Steyn reports, Obama's Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior has promised that "You will never see another federal dam." Ever.
• We wouldn't mind paying taxes if they weren't squandered on green energy projects that lined the pockets of the President's campaign donors.
• We wouldn't mind paying taxes if they weren't used to enable Mexican drug lords to gun down U.S. agents.
• We wouldn't mind paying taxes if they didn't support an increasingly corrupt welfare state.
• We wouldn't mind paying taxes if the government schools actually educated our kids.
• We wouldn't mind paying taxes if the President supported the rule of law and didn't pass laws through executive order.
• We wouldn't mind paying taxes if the military wasn't used as social experiment in diversity and biofuels.
• We wouldn't mind paying taxes if state workers didn't have better salaries, benefits, pensions and job security than the average taxpayer.
  
• We wouldn't mind paying taxes if the President wasn't so arrogant about demanding that we should pay more.