“If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
This is very much a Marxian analysis.
To Marx and Engels and their followers the salient feature of business ownership is exploitation.
Management and entrepreneurship are treated with disdain, and the existence of businesses and capital are taken for granted.
Capital employed by business firms is merely the embodiment of past exploited labor.
Where Marx claimed that capital owed its existence to unpaid labor, Obama extends the analysis to contend that government activities are also a form of this unpaid labor exploited by business firms in a capitalist system.
It is quite amazing to see Marxian economic analysis, which has been thoroughly debunked in mainstream economics and discredited worldwide except for a few backwaters like North Korea and Cuba, find a home in the White House of the United States of America.
The logical extension of the government-as-technology-provider was, of course, the Soviet Union.
I have no doubt that Obama is completely ignorant of what a hollow failure the Soviet Union was at government centrally-planned technological development notwithstanding the vast diversion of resources they poured into it.
It may be that Obama mourns the demise of the Soviet Union even more than Putin.
If this sort of idiocy doesn’t doom Obama’s re-election hopes in November I don’t know what would.