From the Left to the Right: President Obama and his You Didn’t Build That Speech

Monday, July 30, 2012

President Obama and his You Didn’t Build That Speech

Written : July 29, 2012

In the fall of 2011, Elizabeth Warren said, “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own.” President Obama agrees. In his July 13, 2012 speech at Roanoke, VA, he presented his true ideology. The famous quote is, “If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” Conservatives immediately recognized this as a knock on entrepreneurs and nodded as this confirmed their belief that the president doesn’t like business people. Whoa! He and his supporters said we took his remarks out of context. As President Bill Clinton once argued about the meaning of the word, “is,” President Obama is arguing about the meaning of the word “that.”

Conservatives laugh because we know what he meant, but if we listen hard enough, liberals twist his words into a slightly different version. According to the left, the president said that they didn’t build society’s infrastructure, which government crafts for all, including business people, to use. But, if he meant that they didn’t build roads and bridges, trains and trestles, don’t we then say, “no kidding?” It’s obvious, so, what’s the point? President Obama’s been saying we need teachers, road builders, and brick layers. Again, “no kidding,” and, ”so what?” I think President Obama meant (and said) that business owners don’t own their own success; they owe much of it to all of us, the taxpayers. It reveals his lack of experience in the real world, and a huge misunderstanding about the risks entrepreneurs take. Thanks to the old left, our bosses owe us a comfortable workplace, respect for our humanity, and a competitive wage, or salary – but, that’s all. How out of touch he seems when it comes to free enterprise and how it works, but that’s just me.

I should be fair. Let’s take the quotes in context. Mr. Obama said, “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. [Insert famous quote here.] Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges… Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.” I’m tempted to say, “no kidding,” again, but he implied this: Since the guy who created his business thrived, everything it’s built on contributed to its success. While self-evident, this argument falls on its face when you consider that the failed business people used the very same infrastructure, the same school system, the same public transportation. So did criminals, and the poor. Did the roads and bridges and all of that make them fail?

The president points out that we succeed when we work together. His illustration is that we can’t all have our own fire departments, our own Internet, our own bridges. Of course, that’s right, but we don’t want to do everything together, either. We have our own enterprises, whether that’s working for someone or working for ourselves in our own businesses.

President Obama said, “You’re not on your own, we’re in this together.” This is the centralized federal bureaucracy, red tape, big government view, and I disagree with it. We are not alone in life, but the struggle toward our own success is an individual one. I hope we all succeed.

The Entire ‘You Didn’t Build That’ Speech

A Conservative Take

Elizabeth Warren on the infrastructure we all paid for

Elizabeth Warren Video

I tried, but could not find a single article supporting President Obama’s meaning for “You didn’t build that.” Perhaps you can.