Speaking in Roanoke, Virginia on Friday, Obama said:
If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.
Obama also said:
There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who
agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know
they didn’t — 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. 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 were 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 didn’t build that. Somebody else made that
happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government
research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money
off the Internet.
My response:
Somebody
else
invested the start-up money to buy laboratory equipment. Somebody else
had an income of only $10,000 in all of year 1. Somebody else paid for a
high deductible health plan for myself, my wife, and my three
daughters. Somebody else worked 80-hour weeks. Somebody else acted as
an unpaid tax collector for the federal, state, and local governments.
Somebody else paid real estate taxes and personal property taxes on my
laboratory facility and equipment. Somebody else trained employee after
employee. Somebody else developed thousands of customized materials
analysis plans to solve my customers materials problems. Somebody else
slept on a cot into the night to be around to start up one more analysis
or two through the night. Somebody else worked many a 36-hour stretch
straight through to meet a deadline. Somebody else wrote thousands of
analytical reports.
Somebody else
paid my employees and only took their own pay when income was sufficient
to provide it. Somebody else guaranteed the laboratory lease.
Somebody else took the risk of being sent to jail for the possible
violation of some one of thousands of regulations that cannot all be
known and understood by any small business owner. Someone else had to
fire the occasional mistaken hire who could not perform his job.
Someone else went with less than a week of vacation time year after year
after year. Someone else worked weekend and holiday after weekend and
holiday.
I sure am grateful to that Somebldy Else, even if I was
mistaken in thinking it was me. Now that I know otherwise, I am
asking that Somebody Else to step forward and be acknowledged.
But,
one
thing I am really certain about is this: I do not owe governments a
penny more than they have already received from me and my business. The
first 30% of their spending used on legitimate government functions was
worth my while paying, but the remainder was a giant rip-off. Any
penny more that I give government today is money they use to make my
life and my family's lives just that much harder. Much of that money is
actually spent to violate more and more of our sovereign individual
rights.
It
is a good thing that Obama is so blatantly stating what this upcoming
election is really about. He is right that his vision of how our
society and our government should operate is very different from that of
those of his opposition who believe in the American Principle of a very
limited, constitutional government whose only legitimate function is
the protection of individual rights.
Those of us who
believe in the American Principle readily acknowledge that we owe a
tremendous debt of gratitude to those Americans who came before us and
gave us a government that was at one time limited in scope and largely
protective of individual liberty. We are also grateful for those many
productive Americans who made our society wealthy, robust, innovative,
founded on mutual trust, reasonably benevolent, and comparatively
independent-minded. We have long had a society that expected Americans
to be self-managers of their own lives and to live their lives
responsibly. There are tremendous benefits to all of us from this.
This is a society in which people have largely been able to reap many
benefits from their accomplishments and productive work, while providing
rich benefits to all of the rest of us in our society.
Our
society has largely been based on a robust and rich private sector in
which individuals were free to choose their own values and to associate
freely with others of their own choice to pursue those values. We have
been a trader society which operates on the principle of voluntary
exchanges of ideas, goods, and services. I, for instance, could not
operate without the many vendors who make and supply replacement parts
for my laboratory equipment. I am very grateful to them for offering me
that critical service. But, I also pay them well for providing that
equipment and the replacement parts. My customers pay for my services
because I identity the causes of their materials problems and can often
suggest how they can prevent the problem. They are able to make more
money because of the service I provide them. But, our largely private
sector society of free trade and associations provides the very
mechanisms that allow us to acknowledge in appropriate ways the debts we
have to others who supply us with valuable ideas, goods, and services.
Obama
wants to eliminate this voluntary trade and association. He wants to
kill the very mechanisms we have for acknowledging the value of the
ideas, goods, and services that others in our society offer us. He
wants hordes of government central planners to choose our values for us
and impose them upon us using the full force of government. He says
that because we have reaped some benefits from others and from having
government, that we owe it to government to build it up even more. Many things are beneficial at the appropriate level and harmful at higher levels. This
Obama prescription is the equivalent of the argument that if taking one aspirin for a
headache is good, then taking 100 aspirins for that headache is better.
Or if drinking 8 ounces of water now is good, then pouring 10 gallons
of water down your throat now is better. This is shear sophistry. It
is
wifty logic.
I see that the spell checker does not recognize wifty. OK, Obama has a great propensity for
ditzy
logic, which unfortunately works for many Americans today. Apparently,
that is the outcome of government-run schools that want to produce
suitable, compliant subjects for a socialist government. The biggest
ditz of them all, the perfect product of this educational system
promoting socialism, is Obama. He sure managed to make this small business owner angry.
