It didn’t take Republicans long to pounce on Obama’s woefully wrong-headed remarks about American business owners: “If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
“American entrepreneurs are the engine of job growth for our country — they work hard, make sacrifices, and deserve their success,” they shoot back.
An effective ad, imo:
SEE ALSO:
Fox News: Business Groups Criticize Obama Over Remarks About Government’s Role In Success:
David Chavern, chief operating officer of the Chamber of Commerce, accused Obama of slighting the remarkable achievements of extraordinary individuals.
“We should applaud the risk-takers and the dreamers who are willing to stand out from the crowd,” Chavern said in a Chamber blog. “Rather than denigrate what these people have done, we need to encourage more people to be like them.”
The National Federation of Independent Business said the president’s “unfortunate remarks over the weekend show an utter lack of understanding and appreciation for the people who take a huge personal risk and work endless hours to start a business and create jobs.”
“I’m sure every small-business owner who took a second mortgage on their home, maxed out their credit cards or borrowed money from their own retirement savings to start their business disagrees strongly with President Obama’s claim. They know that hard work does matter,” the group also said.
Obama pushed his policy goals of infrastructure (aka stimulus) spending and “government research” as part of a collectivist utopia “doing things together.” It’s simply stunning that he would tell Americans, “If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that.”
After all, could individuals be resourceful and hard-working enough to create whole new enterprises? Obama said:
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.
It is this view of successful businesses—essentially, “You owe us”—that drives Obama’s continued attacks on the country’s job creators in the form of tax hikes and regulations.
It’s a tough time to be a business owner and entrepreneur in America. Surveys show small business owners are struggling, and they are not expanding or hiring because of tax and regulatory uncertainty. Federal agencies, from Health and Human Services to the Environmental Protection Agency, are regulating them to death. And just last week, President Obama announced his latest economic plan was to hit job creators with a tax increase.
Nealz Newz: Obama Revealed:
So … small businessman! How does that sit with you? You took your money and put it at risk. You worked perhaps as many as 80 hours a week to get things running. You had your ups and downs, but you persevered. Vacations? Are you kidding? Maybe it was five years into your new business venture before you ever took a vacation. Every penny you could scrounge up … every spare minute you could find … all went into your business. While others were believing that their role was simply to do their nine-to-five bit five days a week for someone else was their life’s role, you had another game plan — and it worked. Here you are with your successful small business. You employ perhaps a dozen people or so. You take vacations now. You might even have a vacation time-share on the coast. You just bought a new car for the first time in your life. You’re thinking that you’ve done pretty good chasing that American dream, and you’re justifiably proud of yourself. Then along comes Barack Obama to tell you that this business you sweated over for so many years? Well … you didn’t build that.
Does that work for you?
I’ve told you for a while now, and Barack Obama told us himself just a few months ago: That Obama believes America’s greatness comes from government. This “unbelievable American system” that Obama mentions used to be a system based on individual responsibility, freedom, economic liberty, the free market, the rule of law … Obama has done his fair share of dismantling that system. That’s what he meant by “fundamental transformation.”
But let’s get into Obama’s “somebody else made that happen” proposition. Here, of course, Obama was trying to portray the government as the enabler of every entrepreneur who ever started a business enterprise.
lauraw, AOSHQ: Liberalism Is A Cargo Cult:
Obama’s little speech the other day where he essentially discounts the risk of the entrepreneur, is just another way for liberals to prop up the lie at the core of leftism; that the state is a provider.
It’s a colossal and laughably transparent lie. The state provides nothing, because it possesses nothing on its own. The state is the perpetually dependent child of the taxpayer, and not the other way around.
We are told by these geniuses that we are supposed to be building busways and roads and bridges and HIGH! SPEED! RAIL! and that will get us out of the mess we are in.
But all of the roads the government builds- with our money– will not magically create successful commerce all around themselves. Merely building infrastructure and calling it ‘stimulus’ is a childish mimicry of the trappings of a healthy economy. It is foolish to expect the commerce that actually provides these good things to ‘just happen,’ and downright dangerous to try to force this pipedream by spending out our sustenance before we’ve earned it.Liberalism/socialism/leftism is a cargo cult, magical thinking, donut seeds.
We have to remove the levers of power from the hands of these mad children. We just have to.
Nice Deb 
