Obama to business owners: 'You didn't build that'
President Obama, in a speech to supporters, suggested business owners owe their success to government investment in infrastructure and other projects -- saying “if you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.”
Obama’s comment Friday during a campaign stop in Roanoke, Va., came just days after he urged Congress to extend tax cuts enacted during the Bush administration only to families earning less than $250,000 annually -- part of his argument that top earners have an obligation to pay more to trim the deficit.He has the audacity to suggest that businesses thrive only because they have access to roads and bridges. Are you kidding me? First off, our taxes - including the taxes collected by those very same businesses - pay for those roads. Secondly, the infrastructure to which he refers was largely built under national security auspices (hint: There's a reason it's the Eisenhower Interstate system), not the government being business-friendly. And lastly, name me one country, anywhere in the world, that doesn't have some form of roadway system. Oh, you found one? Is it a first world country? I didn't think so.
My friend Dennis of Dragon Leatherworks took offense to President Obama's comments and responded thusly:
"If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen"
Really?
My dad and grandfather taught me how to use my hands, how to think critically, and, by example, taught me to work hard.
No-One taught me how to work leather. I learned the same way I learn everything...I took the skills taught me by my dad and grandfather, applied critical thinking, and figured out how to do it.
Sure as hell wasn't anything I learned in school that helped me make my holster business a success. If anything, Goobermint types HATE what I'm doing, because it promotes and furthers the 2nd Amendment by making holsters appealing to the eye, which in turn makes folks want to carry their guns and show off their great-looking holsters, which leads to more folks wanting to get a gun and get a great-looking holster, and so on.
So, no, someone else didn't *make that happen.* I made it happen. I took the risk, I put the long nights and longer week-ends into making it happen. I've lost sleep making it happen. I sacrificed my time to make it happen. My wife, God bless her, sacrificed right along with me, going to bed most nights waaay before me, knowing that I had found a passion, something that I could really turn into a success, and willingly sacrificing *her* time with me, because she knows how important it is for me not only to be successful, but to be able to get up one morning where this side business is my MAIN business, face that first day as a completely self-employed guy, and be able to bring home the bacon without needing the office day job to make ends meet.
Don't pat yourself on the back too hard, Obama...you and the Goobermint didn't do a damned thing for me.Here's a thought for President Obama: If Dennis ships via Federal Express or UPS, what governmental resource is Dennis using? He's shipping directly from his business - or are you considering that the roads the UPS truck takes to get the address as part of this magical, benevolent "government uber alles" power of yours? Is the assumption that, absent government impetus for building these roads, no roads would ever be built?
Here's a question for our boy genius president: If the US Government didn't build the roads (and, just to throw it in, maintain a professional armed forces to keep us safe from outside invaders), then what the hell *do* we need it for?
That is all.
12 comments:
The government didn't build the roads.
We built the roads.
The government doesn't employ government workers.
We do.
The government doesn't 'provide.'
It comes from us.
I would agree that when I ran my own company it was sucessful because of employees, vendors and customers.
I don't remember .gov being anything but a pain in the butt.
In fact doing business with .gov was just about impossible for the first few years because bid specs, rules and regulations.
Gerry
I think Marko has given that stupid statement of Obama's a good beating.
Somebody needs to remind the President that he didn't build that, either. Nor did he build the freeway system, Washington, or America.
WE built that.
To paraphrase Bill Cosby: "WE brought you into that office, and WE can take you out."
Things like roads aren’t necessarily *built* by Gov.The-All-Powerful, but through it via *Appropriations* – which also includes a lot of free-riding crony-Socialism (Pelosi!), and crony-Capitalism (Murtha!), and just crony-Government folks who have nothing to do with anything but skim the money as it passes by – hey, maybe that’s where he get’s his inspiration…
Our future junior MA Senator (*spit*)made almost exactly the same argument. He steals a lot of his lines from MA politicians, apparently, not just Cadillac Deval.
Obma is right. You can see it for yourself, just go for a drive outside the City into the countryside. ( of course that means you'll have to rent a car since the Transit System doen't go that far.) The Goverment widens or builds a new road and pretty soon the new buildings start to appear and then the busineses just start to show up. ...... Just like the way Farms work. In the spring the farmer plows the field and in October they go out and harvest all the crops. Any observant 8 year old will tell you this is how it works.
........ of course, thoose of us who are smarter than a 8 old, or didn't grow up in the city, were never Obama voters in the first place.
Thank god that the government provided us with the internet...
... otherwise we wouldn't know what Anthony Weiner's penis looks like.
Thank you, government!
Mr. Obama:
If you've got a Presidency... you didn't build that. Somebody else made it happen. (The people who voted for you, in this case.)
If you have a winning 53% mandate from 2008... you didn't build that. Somebody else made it happen. (Somebody skilled at turning off credit-card security checks, for example.)
It doesn't feel good to be told that your successes aren't yours, does it?
On the other hand, if your Administration has a Fast & Furious scandal exploding all around you, that you need to invoke Executive Privilege for... uh, yeah, you DID build that. Enjoy.
As a far as Massachusetts and New England goes, the earliest roads were adapted from the footpaths of the Native Americans that snaked through the woods and skirted the swamps and rivers. When future U.S. President John Adams of the north precinct of Braintree (modern day Quincy) courted Abigail Smith of Weymouth, he followed on horseback what 150 years before was a footpath, now Commercial Street. See http://www.weymouth.ma.us/photoview/view27.htm for the network of Colonial era trails in Weymouth that were once those footpaths.
Following the American Revolution was the era of the construction of turnpikes by private investors who charged tolls for use of the straighter and better constructed roads. If you have eaten a Toll House Cookie, then you have eaten an invention of a restaurant that was a former toll house in Whitman on the turnpike that ran from Weymouth to New Bedford, now Route 18. Another turnpike is now Route 53 which shares a few hundred feet of Commercial Street in Weymouth Landing a mile north of the junction of Route 53 and 18.
See "The Turnpikes of New England and Evolution of the Same through England, Virginia and Maryland" available as a Google eBook:
http://books.google.com/books?id=J5tXAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA57&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false
Many major US interstates and highways follow trails (Santa Fe, Oregon) which follow rivers (Platte, Arkansas, Cimarron). Who, pray tell oh POTUS, made the rivers?
Yes, everyone has gotten a hand up or a kick forward from someone else, but that is very different from owing the .gov for having the grace to allow you to open and run a business. *Sigh* As notDilbert said, some of us grow out of being 8 years old.
LittleRed1
Well, didn't Dennis use intersates to get the hell out of the New York Bloc?
He obviously owes his relocation (and his percieved need to do so) to an insane state and/or federal government.
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