Obama's Socialist Mantra: Risk Takers Are Free Riders

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Ideology: In his war on American exceptionalism, President Obama has turned the sights on exceptional Americans. If you've built a successful business, it wasn't your dream or your sweat — somebody else made it happen.

The unbridled disdain President Obama has for the entrepreneurs who work hard and risk everything was made plain when he told supporters in Roanoke, Va.: "If you've got a business — you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen."

This was stunning news and a colossal slap in the face to the millions of small-business owners who get up every day and by the sweat of their brow and the drive of their ambition still pursue the American dream in spite of the obstacles and hurdles this administration has put in front of them.

In Obama's collectivist world view, we are all ants on a socialist ant farm. We are sheep being led by a government shepherd. Wealth, as we now know, is not to be created but to be redistributed in the manner of the Marxist slogan — to each according to his need and from each according to his ability.

Your success, Obama says, is not your own. There "was a great teacher somewhere in your life," he tells us, and that somebody "invested in roads and bridges."

Is it a coincidence that virtually the only people President Obama gives credit to for anything are teacher and construction unions?

And, with apologies to Al Gore, we are told: "Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet."

So Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, the founders of Google, Facebook and Twitter, are all parasitic pretenders.
Without government, there would have been no Mac computer or iPad? Michelangelo didn't paint the Sistine Chapel, you know. Credit must be given to the folks who built the scaffolding and the inventor of paint.
Of course, this is the president who, in a speech delivered at a high school in Osawatomie, Kan., last December, argued while a limited government that preserves free markets "speaks to our rugged individualism," such a system "doesn't work" and "has never worked" and that Americans must look to a more activist government that taxes more, spends more and regulates more.

Free-market capitalism and limited government took us from a colonial backwater to an economic and military superpower that could defeat Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and the Soviet Union and then put men on the moon simply because we wanted to.

Now we have an administration that says the American people are helpless without it while it outsources space travel to the Russians.

Forget Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Alexander Graham Bell, the Wright Brothers and the risk-taking dreamers still among us. They have a harder time these days, shouldering the highest tax and regulatory burdens in the world and beset by bureaucrats, regulators and environmentalists.

President Obama, the community organizer who never ran a business or met a payroll, wants to increase their energy and health insurance costs.

The president's plan to raise taxes on earnings above $200,000 ($250,000 for joint filers) would hit 1.2 million small-business employers who pay their taxes through the individual income tax.

This condemnation of rugged individualism and the entrepreneurial spirit comes from a leader who has been dubbed the "food stamp president" and who has done more to increase dependence on government than any other. Let us see your college transcripts, Mr. President. And who helped you on your way besides Saul Alinsky and Bill Ayers?

If risk-takers succeed, Mr. President, they do so in spite of government, not because of it. You want to take credit for everything and responsibility for nothing.

Look at the wreckage of your policies, sir, and take the blame instead.