SOMEBODY ELSE MADE THAT HAPPEN

"If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen," Obama said in July in Roanoke, Va.  Only in America could this statement elicit responses in this Newspaper and elsewhere like:  “We're entrepreneurs. We're risk-takers. We put everything on the line.  This president is looking at small business owners as the next pocket to grab out of."

Small business owners simply have not earned a special seat in our grand experiment of American capitalism in economics or as a constitutional republic in political organization.  These businesses exist because of what came before.  The rest of the world cannot get off the boat fast enough to invest capital in a country where small business and entrepreneurs are given an economic climate and political/ social freedom that exists nowhere else.  This is why many of our first generation entrepreneurs are immigrants.

Try and start a restaurant in India, Russia, an Arab country or Asia.  The hurdles are so enormous including no ownership of land, layers of bureaucracy, bribes and lack of legal systems or regulations that almost all small businesses survive only in the underground economy.  Unless, of course, your cousin is the local elected official or runs the local bank, in which case you are a large business.

Try and start a retail store in a small Africa town.  The roads are none existent to get product in or out.  You will be solely responsible for providing power and communication.  The local social system will view you as a show off, not the back bone of the community.

Take your savings and borrow more to develop a farming operation or mine in the third world.  If you have any success you will be nationalized and persecuted.

Before small business owners begin to view themselves as modern day pioneers and economic martyrs they need to take a history lesson.  The American experience in general and the federal government in particular have enabled small business to flourish.  Regulations against monopolies, subsidies, preferential tax treatment, and protectionist trade policy have all played a part.  Each business owner should be overcome with gratitude that: “Somebody else made that happen.”