RedBlue America: Do businesses need government help?

Do America's businesses need government help? President Barack Obama came under fire recently for suggesting that business owners couldn't be successful without government help.

JOEL MATHIS: Obama's critics need a couple of lessons —one about grammar, the other about economics.

First, the grammar. Republicans have been emphasizing just a single sentence from the president's speech: "If you've got a business, you didn't build that." On its own, that does sound like a rebuke of individual initiative.

But that's not what the president meant. Here's the fuller passage: "If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.


Diagram the sentences. It's clear that Obama wasn't referring to businesses when he said, "you didn't build that." He was referring to the unbelievable American system, roads and bridges, the Internet and other institutions. Republicans who claim the president was insulting business owners are either confused or deliberately misleading the public.

Which leads us to the economics lesson: The president is right. America's business owners didn't build those institutions. They — and we —paid for it with our tax dollars. It's a virtuous cycle: We support a government capable of creating order and infrastructure, and those things become the steady rock upon which America's entrepreneurs create unprecedented wealth.

Most Republicans acknowledge this truth, but it's often obscured by the rhetoric of Ayn Rand-loving Tea Partiers and their GOP enablers, especially during campaign season.

Republicans suggest Obama offers a collectivist vision that counteracts America's tradition of rugged individualism. That's not true.

"When we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative," he said in Virginia, "but also because we do things together."

And he's right. Otherwise, what's a "United" States for?

BEN BOYCHUK: Well, yes, that's one way of looking at it. Here's another: Obama said what he meant.

The president often makes sallow, pro forma gestures in the direction of individual achievement in his speeches. The remarks in Roanoke the other day certainly weren't the first along those lines. But his comments are always bookended by paeans to the collective achievements of the country. It's strange. A little tone-deaf.

Of course, at an elementary level, what the president said the other day was blindingly obvious. We pay taxes for government services and infrastructure that makes everyday commerce possible. Who can possibly argue with that? But other observers point out that the president was basically parroting Elizabeth Warren, the Democrats' candidate for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, who gave a speech last year that thrilled her liberal supporters.


Notice the rhetorical sleight of hand: "the rest of us paid for." As if business owners and entrepreneurs don't pay taxes for roads, schools, cops and fire protection. That's nonsense.

Small businesses pay plenty, and come 2013 they could be paying plenty more. If the president has his way and taxes go up for Americans earning more than $250,000 a year, the burden will fall disproportionately on small business owners. A new study by the accounting firm Ernst & Young concludes that 2.1 million business owners would pay higher rates under Obama's plan, imperiling 710,000 jobs.

Obama's policies — taxes, stimulus, health care, you name it — aren't helping. And his rhetoric underscores why. In two centuries, we've gone from "We hold these truths..." to "you didn't build that." This is progress?

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Comments » 1

ar15_223 writes:


That is a sentence and it stands on it's own because it IS a complete sentence.

That's not what the prez meant? How the he!! do you know? You a mind reader? That's what he said, wasn't it?

Obama tells America how he feels when he goes off the teleprompter. He meant exactly what he said to jive up his audience.


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