No, they didn’t build it on their own
by David Atkins
Mitt Romney really wants to capitalize on Barack Obama’s statement that business owners didn’t build their businesses on their own. Digby highlighted the egregious example of Gilchrist Metal yesterday. But there’s even more where that came from. Romney is having trouble finding business owners who didn’t receive government help, even in the most superficial sense:
The Romney campaign has spent the last couple of weeks deliberately ripping Obama’s remarks earlier this month out of context, implying that Obama was disparaging business people by suggesting individual initiative has nothing to do with success. As Slate’s Dave Weigel writes, conservatives have seized on this misinterpretation as “proof” Obama is actually a secret Marxist. The implication here is really twofold: Obama can’t fix the economy because he doesn’t understand business, and because “you didn’t build that,” Obama thinks it’s perfectly fine to take from hardworking rugged individualists (like you) and give to a bunch of freeloaders who’d rather not work for a living (like them).
The problem is that the real-world examples Romney keeps seizing on include people who got help from the government. As ABC News’ Jake Tapper reported Monday, the star of a recent Romney ad hitting Obama over “you didn’t build that” had received millions in government loans and contracts. Romney stopped in Costa Mesa, California Monday to meet with a “roundtable” of small business leaders, held in front of a sign that says “We did build it!”
Naturally, it turned out that at least two of the companies represented—Endural LLC and Philatron Wire and Cable—had received hundreds of thousands of dollars in government contracts. When Romney visited the Boston’s historic black neighborhood of Roxbury last week, Romney touted an auto repair shop, declaring that “This is not the result of government…This is the result of people who take risks, who have dreams, who build for themselves and for their families.” Except it turned out that the auto repair shop guy started out without any funds and was only able to build his business because of a bond issed by the local government.
If Romney was trying to prove that businesses only succeed on the backs of Galtian ubermensches with no external help, he’s mostly proved the opposite point.
None of which even approaches the point that even if these businesses received no grants, loans or contracts to get started, they still depend on the roads, sewers, dams, education, civil protection, general social stability and other services the government provides. As I mentioned before:
Sure, I’ve worked hard to build a business and to stay afloat when many others in my profession have called it quits. But none of it would be possible without the framework of civilization that my taxes help to support. When I buy lunch, I depend on food safety regulators to make sure a corporation hasn’t tainted the ingredients. I depend on a national transportation infrastructure for business travel and for the shipping of necessities. I depend on the post office to deliver the mail. I depend on the government to assure the stability of the Internet through which I do the majority of my work. I depend on firefighters and police to protect my property, my safety and my community. I depend on educators to ensure that the American public remains educated and affluent enough to purchase products. I depend on the social safety net that ensures relative social stability, general prosperity and an absence of armed revolutionary warlords. My own education on full ride scholarship at a state university depended heavily on government assistance. And so on and so on.
Yes, I’ve worked hard to earn some modest success. But make no mistake: I haven’t built that. I merely stood on the shoulders of a vast network of civilization paid for by tax dollars, without which I would never have had the opportunity to succeed at all. Had I been born in Somalia or Burma, my fate would have been as dismal as the fates of most of my hypothetical compatriots.
To the right wing, the notion of collective responsibility and collective success is a dangerous idea. To the rest of us it’s just common sense.
Sadly, the Romney campaign’s pathetic attempt to find any business owner at all who actually “built it on their own” even in the most simplistic way won’t hurt him in the polls. Few will hear about the failure and fewer still will care. Facts no longer determine elections. Values, team loyalty and gut instincts about the way the world works do. The problem is that about half of Americans have entirely the wrong values and gut instincts about the world.
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