Austin Swink’s argument that somehow liberals and progressives do not respect individuality, responsibility or entrepreneurship is misleading and facetious. President Barack Obama did say, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” However, he went on to say that “The point is, when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.”
By no means did he say that an individual cannot make it; just that it is necessary to acknowledge that the government and taxpayers’ money pay for the infrastructure and the assurance of political stability necessary for businesses to emerge and grow.
If the logic that the success of an individual does not require these ingredients is true, why are most Fortune 500 companies and the richest entrepreneurs concentrated in countries that possess good infrastructure, political stability and an educated workforce?
Should we expect Bill Gates or Steve Jobs to create multi-billion dollar companies if they are born in the middle of the Republic of the Congo? No individual’s success is accomplished in a vacuum. Likewise, no successful enterprise is possible without the individual’s drive, intelligence, ambition and ideas.
Progressives recognize that a combination of the individual and nurturing environment are needed to create wealth and prosperity. The government allows the accumulation of money from individuals to create leverage in order to invest on a national level which individual investors or even conglomerates could never achieve.
True conservative ideas died with Reagan years ago and perhaps even before that period. The conservatives today are a bunch of self-contradictory buffoons wanting to expand governmental power to legislate social mores to death while destroying governmental power to regulate the financial system where crony capitalism, fraudulent financial engineering, a lack of business ethics and social responsibility exhibited by some companies do more damage to this country than gay marriage.
