Apologies to the Marines to whom I have great respect*, I’m borrowing their unofficial mantra for this post.  Why?  Well, I’m more of a science/math nerd than an English major but I thought I’d take a stab at writing a response to President Obama’s speech ‘o the year (at least to date) – at least for the portion (in full context) that everyone is discussing.  So here goes:

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with President Obama – because they want to give something back.  Then go ahead and give something back.  Let me help you out – make the check out to the US Department of the Treasury and look up the local IRS mailing address for your state and send it right in.  And then there are a lot of moderate to wealthy, successful Americans who disagree with President Obama – because they’ve paid their taxes (unlike members of his own Cabinet) and watched the government fritter it away on wasteful programs and entitlement programs.  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 so smart.  There are a lot of smart people out there – and you are one of them.  You studied, read, apprenticed, and learned how to do your business – whether it’s in the food service industry or in an IT job in Silicon Valley.  It must be because you worked harder than everyone else.  Let me tell you something – there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there and you are one of them.  You get up and fight through traffic to get to work and maybe you log an average of a 45, 50 or 60 hour work week.  Why?  Because you are a professional who is driven to succeed.  (Applause).

If you are** successful, someone along the line gave you some help.  There was a great teacher somewhere in your life.  And then there were the not-so-great teachers that didn’t push you or help you advance.  The ones who sully the names of the teachers striving to educate our youth and improve our education system.  And then there’s the union leaders who earn hundreds of thousands of dollars doing little to help advance teaching and more to advance the lining of their pockets.  Somebody helped to create this American system that we have that allowed you to thrive.  Yes – you and all the taxpayers before you.  You provided common services from which everyone in this country, including illegal immigrants, foreign workers, and visitors benefited.  Just because you are successful doesn’t mean that you had special access or priviledges with these common services – they served you as much as those in your community who aren’t as successful or that are more successful than you.  All of the taxpayers invested in roads and bridges.  If you’ve got a business – you built that.  You made that happen.  You improvised, adapted, and overcame whatever obstacles and challenges were in your way to make that business happen.  The internet didn’t get invented on its own.  That infrastructure was a combination of government research – funded through your tax dollars, including the corporate taxes your business paid – and private industry investments.  Government research and private industry created the internet so that government and private industry both benefited – private industry could innovate, grow, and expand and government could attempt to be more efficient and deliver better services to its citizens.

The point is, is that when you succeed, you succeed because of your individual initiative and those with whom you partnered.  You capitalized on the common services and your intelligence and hard work to create a business that expands the market.  You create jobs and create wealth.  While you’re not fighting fires on your own, you may be researching and creating tools, products and services to help fire fighters do their jobs better and more safely.  

I could go on, but I think you should get the point by now.  A number of liberal friends and colleagues have tried brushing off the “you didn’t build that” poke by saying that conservatives are taking it out of context.  However, when you read the context, it isn’t any better.  It’s more insulting and reduces the real effort by those creating and driving businesses today.  It heavily implies that government – specifically the federal government – made it happen and you were just there…oh, and you might be smart…and maybe you work hard.  Seriously.

* I have great respect for the Marines.  I am friends with a few, have worked alongside a number of them in my contracting jobs and I’ve stayed on base at Parris Island and watched them train and graduate as Marines.   While many paths lead one to becoming a Marine, the ethos they live by is one to value.

** Reading the official transcript of this speech made me think one of two things: (1) his speechwriter needs to be fired or (2) they have a really, really dim view of private industry.  Note that the tense of this verb is the past tense.  Let me emphasize it: you were successful.  So what happened such that you aren’t still successful at the time of President Obama’s speech?  Similarly, this belief is reinforced by the point last week by our astute reader, BG, if Obama was speaking of the roads & bridges he should have said those or them, not that. 

GorT

GorT is an eight-foot-tall robot from the 51ˢᵗ Century who routinely time-travels to steal expensive technology from the future and return it to the past for retroinvention. The profits from this pay all the Gormogons’ bills, including subsidizing this website. Some of the products he has introduced from the future include oven mitts, the Guinness widget, Oxy-Clean, and Dr. Pepper. Due to his immense cybernetic brain, GorT is able to produce a post in 0.023 seconds and research it in even less time. Only ’Puter spends less time on research. GorT speaks entirely in zeros and ones, but occasionally throws in a ڭ to annoy the Volgi. He is a massive proponent of science, technology, and energy development, and enjoys nothing more than taking the Czar’s more interesting scientific theories, going into the past, publishing them as his own, and then returning to take credit for them. He is the only Gormogon who is capable of doing math. Possessed of incredible strength, he understands the awesome responsibility that follows and only uses it to hurt people.