"You didn't build that"

playswithfood thanks for pointing out that this was not even the President idea. He took it from Elizabeth Warren and didn't even know that she was criticized for saying it. The words appeared on his tela prompter so he read them and it sounded good. I would bet that if a reporter had asked him what he meant he could not have explained the statement you didn't build you business. Thomas Edison never admitted failure. It took him over 400 tries to build the first successful light bulb. When asked why he didn't quit after so many failures he responded that he didn't fail, he simple found over 400 ways that did not work. It is a liberal fallacy that everything comes from the government. The government simply takes, by force if necessary, from one person and gives it to another. We hear so much about big oil and how much Profit they make. I want to drill for Oil, first I have to buy a lease from the government, then if I find oil I have to pay the government a royalty on everything I pump out of the ground to the government. If I make a profit I have to pay a tax on that money to the government. If there is any money left over I can pay myself a salary and pay taxes on that. Just where did the government do anything to produce the oil or develop my business. With any business the government is the first to get paid or if you can't pay they take the business. Mr president the government has done everything it can to ruin my business so it can get tax money and then tell me I am from the government and am here to help you.

Complete and utter nonsense. Dreams. Spend a little less time in fantasyland and a little more dealing with reality. For someone to claim that he built a business all by himself and nobody ever helped in any way is either dishonesty or delusion. As for that Ayn Rand attitude, it is just silly to claim one guy did it by himself. Did he not have employees? They are not furniture. If they are not loyal and dedicated to making things work, the business will fail. Will the guy at the top take it as a personal failure? He will not. He will blame the failure on incompetent and/or dishonest employees. so if it succeeds, it was all his doing. If it fails, it was somebody else's fault. Nifty.

This is exactly right. It was the business owner who synthesized what he or she had learned, created a new product or a new place to purchase a set of products, put forward the money to keep the business running, and took on the risk of losing time, money, and livelihood if the business failed. Did others teach the business owner? Yes. Did others build the roads? Yes (though perhaps the business owner was involved with road construction in a past career?). But it took the business owner to create the business. There is a literature quote going around right now. I believe the quote is taken from Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged," but I'm not sure. In the section, one character makes the argument which President Obama and Elizabeth Warren have made. Another character responds by asking why it was this other character who took this material and this technology and created a hugely-successful business rather than someone else. It was because the character in question had the necessary vision to put it all together and was willing to take the risk in order to bring the concept into reality.

That includes colleges...who does he think paid for those colleges to be built and are paying the salaries of the teachers to teach us so that we can get educated to be successful? The tax payers...we pay for our own success.

It is the same as Hillary saying 'it takes a village.... It's to get us in the frame of mind that it is the collective, the group, the soviet, that makes things happen. But I REMEMBER America was built by RUGGED INDIVIDUALS, the Bill Gates, the Steve Jobs, the Henry Fords, the Thomas Edisons. Sure, we all know that no man is an island, but we also know the government messes things up more than they help things succeed.

Take a look at the whole thing, if you like. He also said maybe you had a helpful teacher or a mother who pushed you to try again. Maybe you did not have the experience you should have for a job, but somebody gave you a shot at it, anyway. The point is, you could not possibly have done what you have done all by yourself. If you built a business, you probably have employees. They are not furniture. They can help you succeed. You certainly won't without them. I don't know what to say about rugged individuals--except that for every person you name, I could give the names of at least five people who were instrumental in their success.

Read the post again and pay attention to the subject, which hardly anybody here is done. The point is, a sentence taken out of context is being used to mean something very different from its original meaning. "Shouldn't businessmen be able to use the roads and other infrastructure in order to build their businesses?" See how easy to change the meaning?

"What they are doing is sleazy and dishonest." trruk1, What is really sleazy and dishonest is all the spin that is going on, including your post, to try and pull back those words and say the president didn't really mean what he said. His whole presidency proves that he thinks this way.

Deliberate distortion of somebody's statements is sleazy and dishonest. I stand by my words. I know what he said and what it meant. You probably do, too. Which makes you just as sleazy and dishonest as the rest.

""So let's look at what he was saying,you are right." See how easy it is? Those are your words. Is that an honest portrayal of what you said?" So you think that using Obama's EXACT WORDS is the same as you intentionally removing a word from the middle of my statement? "As far as businesses existing and flourishing before there were roads, I don't know what history you may be referring to, but it is not from this planet." You are so right. See, I come from this planet where a person can go fishing, and then sell fish by walking on grass, sand, dirt, or a beaten path to a place where people go to buy fish. . Not only that, on my planet, I live in a country where, only a few centuries ago, there were no roads. Somehow, without those roads, businesses still existed and succeeded. "Everything was local before there were connections to other communities." Really? Ever heard of a boat, or is the government getting credit for the existence of water as well? Before roads businesses used to ship goods up and down the east coast in the US. In fact, a lot of goods are still transported that way. Aside from that, most small businesses are local. Nobody in California is doing business with the local computer shop in New Jersey. Nobody in Florida is shopping at a grocery store in Nevada. "As far as the point of the whole speech, it is incontestable." And yet at least half the country contests it. The point was Obama trying to tell non-business owners that they are entitled to the fruits of an entrepreneur's labor because the entrepreneur used roads. I disagree with that because it's the entrepreneur that took all the risks, put in all the hard work, and suffered through the struggles of making that business break even, much less make a profit.

Don't you remember, Obama pretty much took over Disney World too, closed it down to campaign, didn't he?

Still changing the subject, I see. First of all, the subject of this post was the dishonesty of the people who understood what he was saying and what it meant and take a sentence out of context and use it to mean something entirely different. "So let's look at what he was saying,you are right." See how easy it is? Those are your words. Is that an honest portrayal of what you said? As far as businesses existing and flourishing before there were roads, I don't know what history you may be referring to, but it is not from this planet. Everything was local before there were connections to other communities. Roads, bridges, communication lines, schools--those are all necessary for a nationwide business community to prosper. We are all connected. As far as the point of the whole speech, it is incontestable. Nobody did everything all by himself in building a business. It can't be done.

And how dare he call our success and business...."THAT". Is that all he thinks we merit?

I wouldn't say it is only them. Every group has their screwballs in it after all. However, I would have to agree that anyone with common sense knew what he meant. On the other hand, most of the common sense is leaving this country. The vast majority of people just need one thing to cling on to and then they will run with it. They don't care about the rights of other people being trampled on as long as their own rights are preserved. It is a rather sad state of affairs. There are supposed to be monopoly laws and I believe while you are not allowed to be the only one in the area or nearby area offering the services, it is quite easy for big stores like Walmart or Costco to put smaller family run businesses out of business very quickly. It manages to protect them. Some businesses like a grocery store chain in my area, will give money to smaller chains just to continue to have their competition even though they are still largely beating the smaller chain stores.

I will agree with you every group has their screwballs. I just think the Republican party gets the King Of The Mountain Award on manipulating the truth. I know now a days pretty much everyone manipulates the truth to some degree, but no is as good at is the Republican Party. That's what these big corporations do Aida they stretch the law as far as they possibly can without breaking it. Our politicians have made what many people might call unethical behavior legal. Then again many people believe these types of practices are perfectly legit. I guess the moral of the story is don't build your business by a huge chain. These days that is getting harder and harder to do.

LOL, and liberals are the paragons of honesty and straight forward thinking. ABC has proven that liberals thinking is screwed up. http://miltonfriedman.blogspot.com/ "The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit." "Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else's resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property." "Governments never learn. Only people learn." "So the question is, do corporate executives, provided they stay within the law, have responsibilities in their business activities other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible? And my answer to that is, no they do not" "The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that's why it's so essential to preserving individual freedom." "Most economic fallacies derive - from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another." "Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself." "What kind of society isn't structured on greed? The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm; capitalism is that kind of a system" "History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition." "The society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither. The society that puts freedom before equality will end up with a great measure of both."