You Didn’t Build That!

In Roanoke, Virginia, President Obama finally revealed his utter lack of faith in people and his total and complete worship of government. He also revealed that he is not especially bright.

In yet another campaign speech, he was riffing about entrepreneurship, one of a long list of things with which he has no experience, and he first said something about roads and bridges and then said something like “If you built a business, you didn’t build that; somebody else did that!”

Huh?

This will be news to the millions of entrepreneurs who have worked 60, 80, and 100 hour weeks to get a fledgeling business off the ground. The point he was apparently trying to make, is that government built the roads on which you drive to work, so your work wouldn’t have been possible without government. “You didn’t” create your business; “You didn’t” create those jobs; “You didn’t” create wealth; “You didn’t” create opportunity.

Government did.

What complete and idiotic nonsense (A string of expletives would have gone very well here but I don’t generally “cuss”).

Government doesn’t have one thin dime with which to build roads and bridges that it didn’t confiscate from someone who owns a business or works for a business or buys products from a business or owns stock in a business. Government doesn’t create wealth. Businesses, and especially small businesses, are the source of ALL wealth, period.

I could spend a lot of time here talking about what a bad bargain government services are: the high cost, the poor quality, the waste, the wooden-headed bureaucratic obstinacy, the “my-way-or-the-highway” attitudes. But that’s not my focus right now.

Mr. Obama also mentioned the Internet as a government project, a subject that’s important to me, since I’m an Internet entrepreneur. While it’s true that it was a government agency that first linked computers together into ARPA-net and that became the Internet, no government agency or bureaucrat could have envisioned what the creativity of the producer class has been able to do with it and the jobs and wealth that has been created since 1970.

It wasn’t government that created the first web browser and launched the World Wide Web. It wasn’t government that created HTML, Javascript, PHP, ASP, Cold Fusion, Access, SQL, JQuery, Flash, PhotoShop, Wi-Fi, flat-screen monitors, screaming-fast processors and phones that surf the web, take pictures, and talk to you, and on and on and on, to name a few of the things government didn’t do.

When you think of it like that, we realize that it’s just a coincidence that government linked a few defense department computers together for their own purposes, with no thought about other applications. The real explosion in technology took place after private entrepreneurs got hold of it and let their creativity soar. Those creative people would have had the first thought if government hadn’t.

In fact, government continues to be uncomfortable with all that freedom and activity on the Internet and longs to be able to tax, regulate, and effectively kill it. And I predict they will not rest until they have ruined it.