You built your business yourself? Tell it to the world, but get off the tax-payer's tit, first.

It's vampire versus vampire at the National Review. In response to President Obama's "you didn't build that" attack on individual initiative, a New Hampshire contractor insisted that he did so build his business. Except, as Think Progress reports, the guy is a rent-seeker. He built his business by the sweat of the tax-payer's brow in the form of government-subsidized loans, grants and contracts.

The Think Progress article is disgusting, and the comments are worse, but the National Review piece isn't much better:

"Yeah, but surely I'm entitled to get something back from my taxes." The word 'entitled' almost always denotes welfare-slavery, but it means nothing in a context where you do not have a legally-enforceable contract. Your money was stolen from you, yes. But once it was, it became part of a vast pool of stolen funds, and none of that money is yours. When you presume to claim some of it, you are making yourself complicit in the slavery of innocent people whose sole crime was working to provide for themselves and their loved ones.

"Yeah, but if I don't take that money, somebody else will." If so, the people who take it will have soiled themselves. What benefit to you self-adoration will you realize by soiling your self?

"Yeah, but just because I built my business with coerced 'investments,' that doesn't make me the bad guy!" Yes, it does. There is no way to tap-dance around theft.

In truth, most small-businesses don't take government money. The owners of those firms are the victims of the state's countless intrusions, and they persevere gamely while bearing unbearable parasitic burdens. They did build their businesses themselves, with no stolen funds or rent-seeking favors, and they have every right to be proud of themselves. But by giving rent-seekers cover -- by permitting tax-looting thugs to call themselves business-people -- they arm their own enemies.

I would love to see this posted prominently in every place of business in America. If you are not the crook, the leech, the moocher that the president of the United States says you are, tell it to the world -- starting with your customers.

And if you have taken tax money in the past? If you have campaigned for competition-killing laws? Go forth and sin no more. You were wrong, but now you know you were wrong. The past cannot be changed, but the future can. If you continue to try to live as a looter, you will know without doubt what you are -- and so will everyone else. When your neighbors and competitors finally get up the nerve to celebrate their own virtue, they will have no trouble at all expressing contempt for your vice.

And in the battle of vampire versus vampire, scrupulous honesty slays every demon.

My father, in the mid-1960s (just before I was born) decided he was going to open his own auto repair shop. So he bought a bit of land at the south end of our hometown, built a three-bay garage, and opened his business. It did, so he always told me, reasonably well. Two years later, the Commonwealth of Virginia swept in, announced that they were building a highway bypass on that land, gave him fifteen cents on the dollar, and took it by eminent domain. They tore down his building, ripped up the land, and today, if you drive US 29 by the little town of Amherst, Virginia, you drive right over his old property. (The shop was in what is now the median of the four-lane, he always said.)

So he bought some more land, fronting on another road a couple miles outside of town, and he built it again. And he worked at it, dear God did he work at it. He didn’t have sewer, there was no sewer out there, he had his own well and septic field (paid for from his own pocket). He paid for the driveway to the highway. He put his own improvements in (paved the parking lot, etc.). He paid the utilities and taxes and pay and insurance and mandatory unemployment for two or three mechanics to help in the four-bay garage. He bought tens of thousands of dollars of equipment, tools and diagnostic machines and pipe-benders for exhausts, radiator vats and headlight aimers and air compressors.

And he prospered, if you could call working six days and fifty-five hours a week, fifty-one weeks a year, through heat and cold and boom and bust, prospering. His reputation meant more to him than money, and he had a good reputation around town. There was never a lack of business. We weren’t rich, but we had enough to get by. Long hours standing on concrete or in a pit straining looking up at a car ruined his back and wrecked his knees. He worked his ass off. He rode my brother, who worked there, harder than anybody.

And what did government do for him? They took his profits as tax money. They hounded him about whether the toilet seats in the bathroom had split fronts or not (not that a bureaucrat has enough down there to get anything caught in a toilet seat anyway). They badgered him constantly with forms and regulations. The Virginia State Police flat-out accused him of felony theft when one book of state car inspection stickers went missing and refused to listen to reason about it. The government told him he made too much money when he asked about grants to send me to college, and at the end of his life, after two years in World War II and fifty years of paying taxes, when he was in a nursing home, the benevolent all-caring government told my mother that she would have to sell the business and two houses (hers and the one my brother rented) before they’d even think about assisting with his care.

The government never did a damned thing for him. “To” him, yes. “For” him? Never.

You didn’t build that, President Obama. My father did. He built a business that’s still going today, outliving him by 16 years with my brother still running it. He built a business that’s been fixing people’s cars at a fair price for over 45 years. He’s provided jobs, done volunteer work, paid in thousands upon thousands of dollars of taxes. THAT is America, President Obama. Not you. THAT is America.

The only thing you build, President Obama, is dependency, despondency, and apathy. You don’t build. You and your ilk DESTROY.

}:-)4

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