Editorial: If you 'didn't build that,' they can take it

[Stephanie]

hit the nail on the head

SNIP:



President reveals belief that, behind every successful business is a successful government.

THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER



President Barack Obama, who promised to transform America, told a campaign gathering this week, "If you've got a business, you didn't build that."

Whether you take his words at face value or prefer to infer he simply meant government can help businesses by building bridges and roads, the president's speech was troubling.

Implicit in the president's message is that private individuals and privately held companies are not sufficient. Big Government is the engine that pulls the train, in his view.

The National Review's Rich Lowry captures the president's economic philosophy succinctly: "The Obama theory of entrepreneurship is that behind every successful businessman, there is a successful government. Everyone is helpless without the state, the great protector, builder and innovator. Everything is ultimately a collective enterprise."

On even a superficial level, this economic understanding is greatly flawed, and insulting, as Mr. Obama's presumptive Republican opponent in the fall pointed out.

"The idea to say that Steve Jobs didn't build Apple, that Henry Ford didn't build Ford Motor ... to say something like that is not just foolishness, it is insulting to every entrepreneur, every innovator in America, and it's wrong," Mitt Romney said.

On a deeper level, Mr. Obama's vision of what made America great reveals how he would further transform an economy that already has seen his bailouts of the auto and banking industries, the federalization of health care insurance and contrived creation of profitless green industries, all at great cost but with little to show for it.

"The president's remark was a direct attack on the principle of individual responsibility, the foundation of American freedom," writes the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto. "If 'you didn't build that,' then you have no moral claim to it, and those with political power are morally justified in taking it away and using it to buy more political power."

read it all here with comments
Editorial: If you 'didn't build that,' they can take it | government, build, obama - Opinion - The Orange County Register

 

[Katzndogz]

If you didn't build it, you have no right to keep it, no right to the profits made from it, even if IT is your thoughts and ideas. You have them because the government gave you those ideas. Ideas that rightfully belong to the government.

 

[Mr. H.]

There was a time when we had no income tax.
Then we had an income tax irrespective of how that income was generated.
Then, the government looked at how people and business generated income and began to- in essence- tax the method and process of generating income.

Write-offs, deductions, depreciation, depletion, amortization, tangible and intangible costs weren't invented by business but by government. It's become a controlling force in the way commerce is conducted and it discourages investment and hampers cash flow.

We've been led to believe that government bestows upon us rights and privileges in the world of commerce, but it was government that took them from us in the first place.

Oh, almost forgot...

FUCK OBAMA.