Apparently not only does it take a village to raise a child, but it takes a nation to build a company. President Obama’s remark about entrepreneurs today is very disturbing. “If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” It sounds like something out of an Ayn Rand novel (the antagonists of course).
I guess at face value, he is right. It takes investors, managers, employees, customers, amongst others. But I am quite confident that is not what he meant. He was talking about government. As someone who has run their own business, I can attest that pretty much all the government gave me was grief. They took fees and taxes, made me get licenses and a whole raft of other regulations and non-productive work.
Obama is also probably right about himself and his wife. They didn’t get where they were on their own. It took people to lift them up, to get them into colleges, to hire them, to pay for their campaigns. President Obama is a product of the government 0r charity. He is a taker and not a giver, so I guess he assumes that every else is also. He is suddenly reminding me a lot more of Wesley Mouch in Atlas Shrugged:
It was James Taggart who gave him a start in the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources – in exchange for double crossing Reardon in order to help Orren Boyle in exchange for destroying Dan Conway. From then on, people helped Wesley Mouch to advance, for the same reason as that which had prompted Uncle Julius: they were people who believed that mediocrity was safe. the men who now sat in front of his desk had been taught the law of causality was a superstition and that one had to deal with the situation of the moment without considering the cause. By the situation of the moment, they had concluded that Wesley Mouch was a man of superlative skill and cunning, since millions aspired to power, but he was the one who had achieved it. It was not within their method of thinking to know that Wesley Mouch was the zero at the meeting point of forces unleashed in destruction against one another. (Atlas Shrugged, 148)
The ironic thing about socialism is the government only has resources and money to “help others” thanks to those who produced the wealth through capitalism in the first place. A socialist without other people’s money is simply a communist.
