President Obama has found himself the object of much merriment for his claim that businessmen who built their business didn't really build them. What he meant, no doubt, was that no one accomplishes anything in isolation from the community in which he or she lives, but this is such an obvious observation as to hardly need saying. Indeed, as the following video illustrates, telling people this diminishes their achievement and is, whether intended or not, pretty insulting. Mr. Obama, in lecturing businessmen that their success depends upon the contributions of others, comes across very much like these parents:
The election in November will be about two competing visions of how a polity should be ordered. One vision is of a society that seeks to foster and promote individual initiative, ambition, hard work and reward it generously. In this view government should do what it can to make the success of such efforts possible. It should not get in the way of those efforts but rather should facilitate the aspirations and accomplishments of its citizens.
The other vision is of citizens and the businesses they create existing in large measure to serve the state. This view holds that the role of the state is to control and regulate its citizens so that no one has more than what they need and no one has less. In order to achieve this egalitarian vision those who have more should have the excess taken from them because, after all, they didn't achieve it on their own or in isolation from the community so they have no right to it. At the same time, it's not the fault of those who have less that they're poor so they should be given the wealth that those who have worked have earned but don't need.
Conservatives hold the former set of opinions, liberals hold the latter. When we enter the voting booth on November 6th we'll be endorsing one or the other of these visions.
