“You know, if you’re in a business, you didn’t build that.
I had a community organizer tell me so.”
I’m busy not building a business myself right now. I’m checking into the myriad of regulations and licenses and fees, while Big Government is doing ... something. I’m looking into website creation, advertising, product development, suppliers, equipment, and how to pay for all that - while Big Government is doing...something.
Good thing I have Big Government to do all the work and take all the risk for me!
I’m busy not building a business myself right now. I’m checking into the myriad of regulations and licenses and fees, while Big Government is doing ... something. I’m looking into website creation, advertising, product development, suppliers, equipment, and how to pay for all that - while Big Government is doing...something.“You know, if you’re in a business, you didn’t build that. I had a community organizer tell me so.”
Good thing I have Big Government to do all the work and take all the risk for me!
You’re busy being “the man who is actually in the arena.”TR famously said that that is who the credit belongs to. According to his telling, “It is not the critic who counts” - but guess what! It turns out that “the critic” buys ink by the carload! Journalists are critics, and so are all socialists.
So in their telling, it is the critic who counts, not “the man in the arena.” Naturally, they promote the inverse of “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena” - namely,
“You didn’t build that.” Well, if you didn’t build it, who did? And if government built the successful businesses we do see, did it also build the failures (there’s that “risk” thing) we do not see?
In reality, of course, society makes everything - Eberhard-Faber doesn’t make pencils all by itself - But as Thomas Paine pointed out in 1776, society and government
"are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.”The threat of legal enforcement of contracts is government’s main contribution to “building” businesses - but as to what business should be built, when, and where - government has no expertise. Society is the better if it leaves it to you to try to prove you know something useful about that. Leaving you to gain "the credit” for it if you do, and to suffer the loss if you actually don’t.