"You Didn't Build That"

This reminds me of theories of regime uncertainty that is predicated on all business owners being good libertarian economists.

If you want to argue against Obama’s point, fine. But don’t just assume (A.) small business owners think like me, (B.) Obama agrees small business owners think like me, ergo (C.) when Obama disagrees with me he’s lecturing small business owners.

It doesn’t work like that.

It’s sad that “small businesses” are the last socially acceptable way to be pro-market.

RPLong – perhaps I’ll give it another look.

But my point is that’s not what was conveyed except in the minds of people who already thought Obama was lecturing or dismissive of small businesses.

A great exercise is to listen to C-Span in the morning because they get a wide cross-section of callers. They’ve talked about this. You get (alleged) business owners calling in that are incredulous people are interpreting this the way that Larimore is. And then you get (alleged) business owners) that interpret it EXACTLY the way Larimore interprets it.

Obama did not convey what Larimore is suggesting he conveyed. That’s what Larimore already thought Obama believes.

This is the problem. Larimore is projecting her own view of things on everyone else in the country.

As someone who did own, operate and “build” a small business for 33 years I can assure you that many small business people (and most conservatives and libertarians) have been bitching about government and blaming it for their failures the entire time. In all my years of being part of the business community I never once heard a businessman blame himself for the failure of his business.

Of course it is true that people tend to hear confirmation of what they already believe. This is a vivid example of that.

As for what I already believed, I always thought that being a business owner was a much better deal than being an employee. If I had thought otherwise I would have sold my business and become an employee.

I always thought this was the best place in the world to do business. If I had thought otherwise I would have gone to where I thought it was best and done business there.

One more thing. I never thought of myself as a “job creator.” I thought of myself as someone hiring people to take advantage of a marketing opportunity that would go to someone else if I didn’t get there first.

I think she’s put her finger on what people heard and I would go further and say that, although the most-extreme negative interpretations of Obama’s statement are wrong, what Ms. Larimore says they heard is pretty much what Obama meant.

David, I think you’ve inadvertently hit upon the reason why we can’t have a grown-up conversation about politics in this country. There is nothing more infuriating than for someone else to tell you that he knows what you “really” think better than you yourself do, and that is essentially what you are doing here. Can you honestly say that you wouldn’t be thoroughly incensed if someone took a caricature of your actual opinions and insisted, over your protests to the contrary, that that caricature is what you “really” think?

Moreover, if Obama “really” meant that “you don’t deserve credit for your hard work,” then why backtrack on it? You’re asking us to believe that he (1) believes this absurd thing, (2) is sufficiently ashamed of it that he doesn’t want the public to know about it, but (3) let it slip out in an inadvertent moment of honesty. I suppose that’s possible, but isn’t it more likely that he really means what he says he means, and that his political opponents are deliberately misconstruing his statements for their own political gain? What are your reasons for thinking otherwise? Why are you so certain?

Finally, back when I took freshman philosophy, we learned about something called the “principle of charity”. The idea is that when an opponent’s argument is ambiguous, you should pick the interpretation that yields the strongest argument for the opponent’s position. I suppose it’s too much to expect cable news pundits to engage in such gentlemanly debate, but it really depresses me that even we intellectuals can’t muster that minimal level of courtesy and respect for their ideological opponents.

Lets go back to GW for the way to make jobs and a good off the budget stimulus.He got soldiers in Iraq for $1m a year and some of them were killed and others lost body parts. They certainly had nothing to do with our financial success back home , we did it ourselves . Neil Armstrong did it all on his own.” Sure went around taking all the credit!”.

[extraneous code symbols deleted–Econlib Ed.]

I don’t think this article quoted enough of the Roanoke speech. Even if the President was referring to roads and bridges when he says, “you didn’t build that,” It’s really the statements he made just prior that are irksome:

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — 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. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)

President Obama (and Elizabeth Warren before him) is arguing that being smart or working hard cannot even partially explain your success. What remains is taxpayer-funded infrastructure and services, and pure luck.

But the country’s infrastructure is available to all, including all the smart and hardworking failures out there. So what he’s really saying is: If you’re successful, you’re just lucky. You don’t deserve any credit.

The President’s supporters can complain until November about being taken out of context, but when you do look at the full context of the Roanoke speech, what the Presdent conveyed closely resembles the misquotation.

Once again:

Politics is about perceptions; creating, maintaining and changing them.

Perceptions are formed or changed in particular surroundings and circumstances, which affect the perceiver.

This is not about political or social philosophies.

If so, the punditry would be about collectivism vs individualism as reflected in the total rhetoric of Roanoke. “You are only part of a whole!”

But, the electorate does not care about the philosophies; only what they can perceive.
That’s why all campaign with sleeves rolled up; for perception.

rpl nailed it.

Anytime you find yourself arguing against “pretty much” what someone else “meant” as opposed to what they actually say they meant, you are fighting a strawman.

Daniel Kuehn
I think a complaint isObama hasnt “been around” except in echo chambers. BUt ihear such claims with regularity. So will you if you visit kos or other suchsites.

David N gets it right.

Looking at the whole speech, it is clear that the president believes that all successful people owe some credit to the government, and no one gets where they are without government help.

I wish I could find it again, but I saw a political cartoon depicting Orville Wright flying over Obama and the president saying: “You didn’t build that.” The list can go on and on (communication devices, computers, autos, appliances, medicines, building materials, etc.) of things that the government did not directly support or have any direct involvement in. Sure everyone benefits from national defense and roads, but most great ideas and product development comes from private enterprise.

The larger point the president does not seem to grasp is that government does not exist without people willing to support it. Government income comes from taxes. Income taxes come from people with goals of building businesses – plain and simple. When people stop creating or expanding businesses, the economy stops growing. If many more people stop paying taxes (by either by not working or through the underground cash economy) and tax revenues decline, this country and government will be in a lot of hurt.

Obama seems to believe that rich people got that way unfairly, and have to share their wealth. That is the message he conveyed (deliberately or unwillingly) in Roanoke.

The basic problem with Obama’s speech, as with Warren’s tirade before it, is that he’s trying to write himself a blank check.

Yes, businesses use basic infrastructure to make their money. And yes, many business owners received public educations. This much is uncontroversial.

But do the employees of those businesses not benefit from the existence of infrastructure as well? And the customers? Didn’t everyone else get to go to public school, too?

So how much is the business owners’ fair share? Obama’s answer, predictably, is “more.” But how do we know that? Vigorous hand-waving is no substitute for a proper reckoning, but Obama expects us to accept it as such.

If government provided nothing but public goods, that would arguably justify a flat consumption tax. But you can’t justify even that, much less a graduated income tax, on these grounds when a wide majority of government funds go towards the provision of private benefits to the lower and middle classes.

The real explanation—that we tax the rich because that’s where the money is, and because concentrating the burden of taxation among a small number of voters and distributing the spoils widely is how you win elections—is much less morally satisfying.

The problem with YDBT/IBT is that it appeals to owners and there are a lot more non-owners than owners. That’s why I prefer:

Time for a turnaround

or just

Turnaround!

I confess, I can’t make any sense of the statement if “that” is supposed to refer to “roads and bridges.” Who is it that made the “roads and bridges” happen, if not business owners? All of together do infrastructure, except for business owners? What sense does that make? “Somebody else made that happen” means that business owners have no role in producing our social infrastructure, which is a bizarre claim. If that’s what the statement meant, someone should ask who he thinks pays taxes in the US.

Someone should also ask him why it is he gets to make decisions, rather than someone else. Democracy doesn’t get you there. Is he as entitled to make presidential decisions as the average business owner is to make decisions with respect to that business?

RPL,

Even if I charitably assume that “You didn’t build that” means “you didn’t build that alone”, it’s still a non-starter for me.

“You didn’t build that alone. You had teachers, and people building roads and bridges, and employees, and people buying your products, and so on and so forth.”

The proper economic response is, “Sure. And I’ve paid taxes to various governments, donated time to various projects and charities, rewarded my employees with salaries and provided products that people valued more than the money in their pockets.”

“That is, I’ve engaged in many, many mutually beneficial exchanges, for which I am thankful. And everyone else should be thankful for what I’ve provided that they’ve willingly chosen to take.”

Obama’s statement apes this fundamental truth of voluntary exchange with the language of obligation and patronage. “Hey, you’re very lucky we’ve done you a favor by making you rich. But you need to return the favor, and you ought to be happy about it”.

But that’s a fundamentally non-economic (and even counterproductive) way of thinking about economic activity. The world isn’t a zero sum set of quid pro quo transactions. The name of the game is adding value, and successful people and successful businesses are doing that by definition.

Lord writes, “Show me the business that has built the roads and bridges.”

It is the private sector that actually builds the roads and bridges. You may say, “But it is the government that pays for it”. And where does the government obtain the funds to pay for roads and bridges? The private sector, of course.

This is what Obama said, “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

Clearly, the “you didn’t build that” refers to business. You didn’t build your business, somebody else built your business. Obama and his Democrat supporters are clearly trying to dissemble by saying that he was not referring to business but to roads and bridges. Right…. But even this attempt at covering up his true feelings doesn’t hold water, because without private business, there wouldn’t be the tax revenue to build roads and bridges.

It may seem like government is building roads and bridges, or supplying public teachers but the financial burden falls on the private sector. When the government becomes self-financing and not relying on taxes for its revenues, then it may be plausible to say that you didn’t build that the government did (referring to roads and bridges, right…).

David N –
You’re taking a single line, and I agree – if that specific line you picked from the speech was what he said in response to your imaginary query he would sound like a jerk. But you can’t just pick stuff out of a speech like that and pretend its a response to your imaginary question. Let’s say instead we picked this line from the speech. If he had responded: “The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.”

If that line would get you bent out of shape, I don’t know what to tell you.

Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama are taking I, Pencil – a classic – and expanding the logic to the public sphere. It’s good economics and its no more denigrating to businessmen than I, Pencil is, which also highlighted the fact that genius and success is a result of a wide network of social action.

Hunter – Great point about the maternal guilt trip. That’s exactly what it was. Well said.

Daniel – Have you considered what it would mean if you were wrong?

The whole Warren/Obama discussion has its place: in Junior High this could be quite a good debating point.

For the President of the United States in the year 2012 this is just feeble beyond comprehension, and unfortunately reflects the fact that this man has made next to no effort to get the economy back on its feet.

Daniel – It is not my imaginary query. It is the President’s. He was “struck by people” who explain their success in such a way. In his speech he presented his imaginary answer to his imaginary query and gave his response. He made himself look like a jerk. You pointing out that other sentences in the speech are less stupid is not an argument.

DK – What did Obama convey? How do you know?

Okay, if this double posts sorry. The following is from a campaign speech Obama gave in Dothan, AL a short time after the “You didn’t build that speech.” Does anyone here see anything positive in this twisted version of the classic fable? And does it not shed some light on his actual thinking?

“Once upon a time there was a grasshopper jumping around in the summer sun in a field, somewhere or other.Probably Kansas. They have fields in Kansas, right? Or maybe it was Iowa. One of those states in the Midwest, anyway. So this grasshopper, he’s just jumping and chirping and singing to his heart’s content when this ant comes along, sweating and huffing and puffing and carrying an ear of corn. 
So the grasshopper says, “Hey, Mr. Ant – what are you doing with that ear of corn?” And the ant says: “I’m going to take it home and store it for the winter, and I suggest you do the same.” But the grasshopper doesn’t pay any attention, and when winter comes the grasshopper doesn’t have anything to eat, so he dies. 
Now there are those who say – and my opponent is one of them – there are those who say this story shows the need to be fiscally conservative. And you can believe that if you want to. But I’m always struck by those insects who think they are so smart, who think they work harder than everybody else. Well, let me tell you something: There are a whole lot of hardworking bugs out there. 
Where do you think that ear of corn came from that that ant was carrying? Somebody else planted that ear of corn. Somebody else tilled the field and laid the irrigation pipes and planted the seeds and put up scarecrows and all of that. And they probably did it with some help from the local extension agent and maybe a start-up grant from the Department of Agriculture. So if you’ve got an ear of corn, just remember you didn’t grow that – somebody else did. So what I think what we need to do is, we need to sort of spread the corn around. And that’s what I’ve been trying to do these past four years: spread the corn around.” 

Agreed with MikeDC — I can’t believe that:

a) Obama actually made that speech,
b) his opponents aren’t making a big deal about that one as well, or that
c) Obama actually resorted to the “spread the ___ around” after he already got flak for saying it before.

As with Clint Eastwood debating the empty chair, many people are no longer even pretending to be arguing against what Obama actually says. It is so much easier to just argue against stuff you make up.

@Lord

The entire point was it takes public and private working together to create the economy.

Rubbish. The public sector and private sector DO NOT work together. The public sector exploits the private sector through compulsory taxation. It did so under the Pharaohs, the Caesars, and the all the various Kings, potentates and tyrants that despoil the history books. The State, always and forever, even those democratic, exploits.

The public sector allocates the money that it seizes through threats of violence and intimidation to simply maximize political return. Specifically, it spends only for ruling elites to retain political power. In a democracy, the State doles out other people’s money with the sole view of keeping incumbent public officials in their office and so government workers and officials can continue to live at the expense of their host. It is not an act of charity, kindness or benevolence. It simply, ruthlessly and coldly serves those in power. The fact that this political patronage may incidentally be to the advantage of some of those subjects who pay taxes does not therefore mean that there is any need for gratitude by said subjects in any way whatsoever. If the government provided nothing it would be replaced or violently overthrown. So it steals from all, gives the loot to those it must, and helps itself to the rest.

The hostility and distrust that subjects have felt toward their oppressive governments, all of which have exploited their fellow man over the past 10,000 years, has been completely warranted.

It is the government that “didn’t build that”. The IRS never says “please” or “thank you” only “more!” and “now!” so don’t expect me to say “thanks” to those grasping sods. Without a private sector to ruthlessly exploit and predate, there wouldn’t be any money for the State to build pot-hole filled roads or bridges, pay under-performing clock-punching teachers, fight useless wars and pay wealth destroying armies, fund self-destructive anti-social welfare programs, build concentration camps and gas chambers, or construct elaborate palaces for the ruling elites.

Obama’s simply parroting the view of the extreme left and of the all the rulers and tyrants of recorded history.

@ Greg G

The fact that there have been no governments “over the last 10,000 years” that are acceptable to you should be a clue that that your expectations for what should be acceptable are entirely unrealistic.

You’re entitled to your opinion; just as I am entitled to absolutely reject your point of view.

My expectations are not “entirely unrealistic”.

I do feel, however, that the majority of people have a “entirely unrealistic” Disney view of the world. Human society has always been hierarchical, violent and exploitative. There have always been individuals who have sought power and sought power with the expressed purpose of living at the expense of others. The vast majority of those in power are of that type.

This is independent of my “expectation” or yours. It’s just a fact of life.

@ Greg G

Despite the many faults of this system, history shows it to be far better than anything else that has been tried as a solution to the human tendency toward the abuse of power

No disagreement there. However, my disagreement with the statists like Obama is they that posit that “far better” therefore implies good, noble and something to be praised.

It is “far better” to be force-fed a pound of crap than to be force-fed a pound of potassium cyanide, arsenic or sulfuric acid. The former may make you sick, but the later will instantly kill you. This, however, does not alter the fact that being forced to ingest feces is very unpleasant, unhealthy, and repellent.

Democracy does indeed have many,many irredeemable faults. While It may result in fewer abuses of power than more repellent systems, that is merely relative.

Relying on private violence to enforce societal rules or having no rules at all have always gotten worse results.

Agreed. Relying on private violence or having no rules at all will indeed fare worse. But having no rulers is not equivalent to having no rules. A human society can exist without rules, but it is not necessary to anoint a small group of people a monopoly of force, and to allow them to use that violent force to manipulate others at whim. Most governments throughout history claimed a right, usually from some god, to do just that. Today’s Western democracies are more subtle, but they manufacture the “will of the majority” to justify the same exploitative behavior.

It is precisely to limit the destructiveness of those parts of human nature that we establish constitutional democracies where government has a near monopoly on the legitimate use of force

On this, we do not agree. I’m can’t say for sure about you, but I didn’t establish anything– so “we” therefore couldn’t. The West adopted constitutional democracies during the period of the late 18th century to the early 20th century. I was forced to “inherit” this system as a fait accompli. In my view, the transition from constitutional monarchy to constitutional democracy occurred since the ruling elite could no longer hope to justify their rule through the “divine right of kings”. In order to preserve the old hierarchical order they adopted constitutional democracy. This concession occurred not to protect *us* from abuses of government power, but to preserve *their* privileged position. It was, is, and always has been a ruse. Instead of “serving the King”, now we “serve our country”. No real change.

It is the idea of the noble savage living without government that is the real Disney fantasy.

The noble savage was an historical fiction as told by Thomas Hobbes. Living without a government in human society is as likely as living in a society without murder, theft, rape, child abuse, war or mental illness. Not in my lifetime, that’s for sure. As long as there are people with the psychological predisposition to control, exploit and manipulate others, the State will be with us. Probably always if you’re an optimist; always,if you aren’t.

That said, I think a world without self-appointed, exploitative rulers would be a better world, much the same way I feel that a world without murder, theft, rape, child abuse, war or mental illness would be a better world. On that, I’m sure we can all agree.

I scanned your post and I would like to comment but only if we are talking about the same statement by the President. Please read this post by FAIR, Fairness And Accuracy in Reporting. These guys, Peter Hart and Jim Naureckas are awesome. http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4593 This is a media watchdog group that I support and I think anyone who relies on the media for blogging material should subscribe to their email alerts and monthly newsletter (both in kind and financially). Otherwise I’ll just back Daniel Kuehn.

[This comment was accidentally deleted and has been restored. (It was in the spam folder and I hit delete for a batch of items too hastily.) I apologize for the inconvenience. –Econlib Ed.]

I am never shocked by naked partisanship but the one certain rule of english pronouns is that they agree in number and gender.

It is revealing that all this pretense that there is some big mystery about whether “that” referred to businesses or infrastructure conveniently ignores the fact that Obama and his campaign have repeatedly clarified that the reference was to infrastructure.

I wonder how many commenters here would think it was OK for someone else to decide for them what they really “meant” by their own words?

Since reading the FAIR article I’ve done a complete 180 on this. My kid just built a cool spaceship “all by herself” but I said, “You didn’t build that. Daddy bought you those Legos.” She cried for a bit until I explained that I was pointing to the Legos and not the spaceship itself. I interrogated her for a while to find out who told her about spaceships so we can send a small gratuity.

My wife is making dinner tonight–with the help of millions of Americans and Democratic governance of course–and I told her grace will be a lot longer now that there’s all these other institutions like the USDA to thank. If she burns the dinner I guess we can skip the whole thing. As another great President said, “success has many fathers but failure is an orphan.” He never heard about TARP.

My wife got annoyed with me and said that we already paid a fair price for the food and paid all our taxes too, and were generally helpful to strangers and neighbors alike, so was all this extra gratitude strictly necessary? I don’t know how she could be so stupid. It’s like she can’t even read.

NFL season is starting up and I for one am getting tired of seeing every running back with extra yardage point to the sky and thank Jesus, or point to the stands and thank the fans. What about the folks who made the roads that got the fans to the stadium? I’d like to see the players point towards the White House.

Obama is really on to something. It’s fun to go around reminding everyone with money they owe a huge debt to unseen people who were presumably already compensated. The response so far has been amazing.