Monday, July 16, 2012

What does Obama mean... I didn't build my business


I, like many others in the country who want clear, concise and factual information subscribe to the Heritage newsletter.  I got this missive in the mail this morning

Morning Bell: Obama Tells Entrepreneurs “You Didn’t Build” Your Business
Obama: 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 just so smart.
http://www.mrctv.org/videos/obama-if-you’ve-got-business-you-didn’t-build-somebody-else-made-happen


With this I immediately thought of a friend of mine who had left a corporate job and started a business in his basement.   He spent years there, developing the complete product with he and his wife's own genius, inventiveness, and sweat, before moving to an office.  The business grew but always had issues with regulations.  Whether obscure sales tax implications and penalties, or other even more painful ones. The last four years he has become even more vocal to me about his complaints of government intervention in the form of regulations.  His background is not one of a conservative family, in fact very, very, much the opposite, but he has come to a strong limited government viewpoint through his personal experiences.

While I often helped him in the early days with projects, work, and discussion, I never once thought of it as "I built his business"! The arrogance of such a statement, and the blind misunderstanding of how things develop staggers me.

I had planned on sending him the Heritage link, but he beat me to it in this email exchange.
From F: "What the…"
a link to Obama's speech.
From D:  I meant to send that to you this morning, but I wanted to see the reaction...  I couldn't quite hear it from here (7 miles away?) 
From F: No $#!+. You don’t want to be near me after reading something like that. I pray the People have enough sense to kick this President [deleted original word, sorry F. you went a little overboard] out of office in November before the country goes downhill any further.  My partner [his wife, hey its a small business] can't spend any time selling because she spends sooo much of it dealing with our governments BS.

There are many who have made negative (some down right hostile) comments to me about the belief that small businesses suffer greatly at the hands of this governments excessive regulations and do and will vote with their feet.  But the reality is, my friend has often remarked about the possibility of moving his business out of the country, the state is a growing certainty, even though it is basically a company of he and his wife.

Spending half your small companies resources on governmental compliance and regulations should be considered ridiculously unreasonable in anyone's book.  We need to replace any governmental representative who does not actively participate in reducing this burden, and denounce the attitude that the government built an entrepreneurs business because they voted to build roads. That means replacing progressives that stand for ever larger government.

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