President Obama is Wrong

     So as anyone who has been following the news lately will know, President Obama recently made statements talking about how the government contributes to economic growth through infrastructure and how it is wrong for business owners to insinuate that they themselves are the ones who've built their businesses up.

     However, in my opinion, he took it way too far when he said, literally, that if you have a business, "you didn't build that." Here are my arguments on this:

1) Technically, yes, government could be said to contribute to economic growth via infrastructure development, funding of research and development, and so forth. But I don't think anyone really argues this point except for hardcore far-right libertarians (who would have been the types against say the Interstate Highway System as being too socialist). It is a complete strawman to use this as an argument in favor of higher taxes the way he is. They are two completely separate issues, especially considering that we have no direct way of knowing what the government would even spend the additional tax money on.

     If we were a country with virtually no infrastructure, then you could make an argument perhaps for some higher taxes for a revenue-starved government under the argument that the money spent on infrastructure would eventually be paid off from all of the economic growth and investment that would result from the infrastructure. But we are not such a country right now. Regarding upgrading our existing infrastructure, well this is a president who blew almost $1 trillion dollars in the name of stimulus and didn't focus it on infrastructure upgrades when he had ample opportunity to.

2) Who is he to talk about what it takes to build and run a business? This is a man who has never so much as run a 7/11. Businesses do not just arise out of nowhere. Even those businesses that utilized the research and development that was funded by the government to create new products and services, well the actual creation of those products and services was done by the businesspeople themselves, not the government.

3) He points out that the Internet was "created" by the government. Well a few things on this. Yes, it was started by the government, via DARPA (at the time ARPA, Advanced Research Projects Agency, itself created by the space program), in order to have a wya to keep the national communications infrastructure from going down in the event of a nuclear strike. But much of the development of the Internet today was created and developed further by private companies. Furthermore, it wasn't really "the government" in the way he thinks of it, but the defense department, which he is seeking to cut in funding right now.

4) Much of our modern technology is attributable to infrastructure and research and development from the space program and defense. Well if that's the case, then by Obama's standards, shouldn't we gun up the defense budget and the space program even further? Why cut them? He is arguing for raising taxes to bring the government more money on the idea that it is the government that drives economic growth, but then he is cutting the two major areas of government that legitimately have helped drive economic growth.

5) A great point (attributable to Greg Gutfeld on the Fox News show "The Five") I thought is that claiming that the existence of infrastructure means the government deserves some credit for the creation and growth of businesses would be like claiming that the government is also responsible for any murders conducted by criminals who have used the roads and bridges to drive around and kill people.