2012 Election Year - Marxist Visions

If there's one honest, and utterly important thing Obama said this year it was this,

"If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen,The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet."

- Barack Obama - July 2012

"If you've got a business, you didn't build that.  Somebody else made that happen."  Obama truly believes this, no matter how utterly wrong it is, not to mention offensive to millions of hardworking Americans.

Obama demagogues capitalism at every opportunity and denigrates success.  He believes it takes a village to raise an economy, rather than the product of millions of business owners all working to improve their own lot through hard work.  Oh, and why, pray tell, do business owners want to do this?  Because of an evil 4 letter word in Obama's vernacular.  PROFIT.

He and his fellow Democrats act as if business owners are sacrificial lambs who exist to provide a leviathan government with sustenance.  Wrong!  They believe that the government, not those American business owners, are responsible for successful businesses.  Wrong!  In their worldview the business owner depends upon government for livelihood.  Wrong!  It is the government that depends upon the successful capitalist for its existence. 

Businesses exist to make profits.  They exist because they provide a product / service that others consider to be of value.  That is, while they exist to make a profit, their existence works to the mutual benefit of others, from the people who buy the product and are enriched, to the people who own company stock, to the mail room clerk who has a job because that business is profitable.  Profits are what drive any successful economy.

One thing I haven't heard mentioned is that everything Obama said applies not just to profitable, successful businesses, but also to business ventures that fail.  I know people who never got their business off the ground, or people who had their small business go under within the first year.  A great teacher, an American system, government investment in roads and bridges, they all existed just the same for those business owners who were successful as they did for those who were unsuccessful.  If those same variables existed for the successes and the failures, it stands to reason that "somebody else / government" wasn't what determined business success.  Government didn't build that.  Government wasn't the key to those businesses which succeeded.

I know successful business owners.  Not one of them got where they are today by sitting on their ass and receiving government help.  Not one of them relied on the government.  Each and every one of them took individual initiative, and not insignificant personal risk, to get where they are today.

I know someone who started a successful lawn care service.  In the beginning it was one guy with push mower, hedge clippers and a weedwhacker shoehorned into the trunk of a little 2 door Honda.  He's far more efficient now.  Government didn't help him.

I have family friends who own a towing business.  They've made a good life for themselves, but they work their asses off.  When they're at the beach with us, on vacation, out riding jet ski's, they're still taking business calls.  4AM on a saturday, they're taking calls from home.  They built that.  They did it through honest to god hard work which continues to this day.  Government didn't build that.

That said, it's hardly shocking that a Marxist who has never been outside academia, never had to run / own a business, and never worked for a private business would lack even the most basic understanding of what makes the American economy work.  Free market capitalism.