The American Sun

During a campaign stop in Roanoke, Va., Obama suggested to his supporters that business owners owe their success to government investment and that their duty is to share their profits equally with the workers who help them run their business or manufacture their creation.

The speech came just days after he urged Congress to extend the Bush tax cuts only to families earning less than $250,000 because top earners have more of an obligation to pay more to trim the deficit.  Welcome to Marxism 101.

 “There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me because they want to give something back,” the president said. “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.

“If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges.  If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.  Somebody else made that happen,” he said. “The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.”

My grandfather invented a device during World War II called the “luminous radar plotter” to aide in ship navigation.  He’d been a merchant seaman and radio engineer for much of his life.  If he had any investors at all, it certainly wasn’t the government.  He had no employees, either, other than my mother, helping him to build this thing and ship it off.  He didn’t invent radar, but he invented a better way (until the computer age came along), for seaman to track the weather and other ships in order to prevent accidents.

Then there's Pete the Machinist (he's one of the few people who doesn't mind being named).  The manufacturer he worked for had to lay him off and he decided to start his own machinery business from his basement.  He works about 12 to 14 hours a day in his shop; his hours are much longer than when he worked for a company.  He may have had help from his affluent ex-father-in-law, or he may not have.

This is one hard-working, blue-collar guy who can't understand why America signed onto NAFTA.  But rest assured - Pete has earned his money and then some.  No one "gave" it to him; certainly not the government.  He probably thinks Obama has a lot of nerve telling him he didn't make the hip replacement parts with which my mother is able to walk.  Pete didn't do that?  Someone else did?

George Mecherle, of State Farm Insurance, had no one to help him.  He had a different idea for insuring automobiles and homes, one that didn’t punish safer, rural drivers for the accidents caused by city drivers.  He worked diligently at selling investors on the idea.  He almost gave up and threw his plans into the fire, but his wife retrieved them.  Mecherle went on to build a successful company, no thanks to the government.

Any of the company’s agents will tell you how much they owe to their team members, and to the underwriters and claim representatives within the company.  The agents treat their teams well, but they have to earn their place in the agency.  The company has “given back” plenty to the community in charitable donations and its employees have volunteered countless hours of valuable time.

Charity and donations.   Those are words you don’t hear from Obama.  Taxation isn’t “giving something back.”  It’s taking something away.  It’s taking money away from those who earned it and giving it to those who didn’t.  The percentage of those truly in need should not be so high that they can’t be aided by charitable donations and volunteer help.  That it is so high is an indication of government interference with the natural order of commerce and free markets.  Socialism divides a country into two classes – a small, highly-educated and protected elite, and a larger mass of people who either receive government assistance or menial jobs to serve the elite – housekeepers, landscapers, grocery store clerks.

The middle class has “given back” so much in taxes already that they have nothing left to give.  Three cities in California are about to seize the mortgages of distressed property owners.  They’ll be allowed to live in their homes at a reduced rate, the original investors will be paid back, and a new set of investors will take over the mortgages.  But this plan will bankrupt those cities. 

San Bernardino is not the first city in California to go bankrupt.  Several years ago, the city of Vallejo declared bankruptcy.  Now others are following.  Undoubtedly, wealthier residents decided they’d paid enough of their “fair share” and left for healthier economic climes (like Texas).

Taxpayers don’t create deficits; irresponsible governments do.  Obama’s casuistry in laying the blame for the deficit at the feet of the taxpayers demonstrates just how far his impudence extends.  His Marxism will rob Americans of the real American dream – to live their lives independently – of the initiative to follow that dream, and of the rewards the creative need and deserve to continue innovating and improving the American dream.

Under Obama and Marxism, there will never again be anything new under the American sun.