Let the campaign begin!

VivaStPauli wrote:
Also the whole "We built that!"-schtick is rather embarassing, considering that Obama clearly wasn't speaking of businesses that weren't built by individuals, but of infrastructure, in his whole quote. Specifically, he was talkling about bridges and roads.

“You Didn’t Build That” Isn’t Going Away
It doesn’t matter what Obama meant. Here’s why.

The official theme of the GOP convention Wednesday night was "We Can Change That," but that didn’t stop several of the speakers from revisiting Tuesday’s theme, the base-rallying battle cry: “We Built It.” The message: The righteous exploitation of President Obama’s “You Didn’t Build That” gaffe isn’t going away.

Ever since the president stood before a crowd of supporters in Roanoke, Va., on July 13 and, while explaining why the wealthy should pay more in taxes, uttered the infamous words “If you've got a business—you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen,” conservatives have hammered him for his disregard for small-business owners. And liberals have hammered back that Obama was taken out of context. To be fair, this is the full quote:

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business—you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.

Obama supporters can complain all they want. They can argue that when he said “that,” he was talking about the roads and bridges, not the business itself. It doesn’t matter. And it’s pointless to blame Mitt Romney or the RNC or anyone else for taking it out of context. Here’s why.

Many moons ago, I spent a couple of years in a fiction-writing program at a local university. I never finished the novel I aspired to write, but I did learn some valuable lessons. The most important: “It doesn’t matter what you meant. What matters is what you conveyed.” In the context of class, that meant when we were sharing our work and listening to feedback, we couldn’t butt in and say that we’d meant something else. We needed to take ourselves out of our own head and try to understand what our readers had heard.

In the case of Obama’s Roanoke speech, conservatives everywhere heard, ”You don’t get credit for your hard work.” I agree with the Washington Post for giving the Romney campaign four Pinocchios for repeating the truncated quote ad nauseam. I wish Romney’s team would use the full version. Because even in its full glory, it would inspire largely the same reaction. The sentiment resonates with small-business owners—and it’s small-business owners who have been most vocal in their response to Obama’s comments, from the co-owner of an Iowa deli who good-naturedly catered an Obama campaign stop in a T-shirt saying, “Government didn’t build my business” to the hardware store owner who was a bit less gracious.

Conservatives suspect that President Obama sees government as the solution to everything. Only someone who thinks government is the answer would describe a stimulus program that cost at least $185,000 per job as successful. I can’t think of a starker difference between the liberal and conservative worldviews than the Life of Julia slide show. Liberals look at that video and see a woman aided by a social safety net. Conservatives look at it and are creeped out by the fact that liberals think the very-capable-seeming Julia can’t do anything without government help.

That same sentiment comes through in the “You Didn’t Build That” speech. Obama’s words contain an undertone that business owners are selfish, that they are ungrateful toward those teachers who helped them along the way. And that is where Obama’s misunderstanding of small business, real or perceived, shines through.

Quite apart from whatever taxes they pay, small-business owners are part of the very fabric of their communities. Someone has to run the pharmacy. Someone has to run the gas stations. Local businesses don’t send their profits back to Bentonville, Ark.; Minneapolis, Minn.; or Cupertino, Calif., but rather put them back into the community. The restaurant owner gets his produce and meat from local stores, the mechanic hires a local painter to spruce up his shop. They are the ones who not only give money to the athletic booster club and the PTA, but show up to help out at fundraisers. And if that teacher who helped them with their math homework stops by, the owner gives her a free oil change or an extra slice of pie for dessert.

The president’s comment implies that business owners are ignorant of all the benefits they get from government. And it makes Obama’s supporters look unaware of all that government gets out of businesses and how political decisions affect entrepreneurs. Ask a business owner if they feel like they get more out of the government than they give. Sure, it helps that the city paves the road that was there for 20 years before they opened their business, and maybe they are grateful for that new traffic light. They understand that the local police protect their livelihoods. On the other hand, do politicians not appreciate that business owners match every dollar their employees contribute to Social Security and Medicare? Do politicians not understand when they are patting themselves on the back for raising minimum wage that somewhere, some shop owner is reaching for the ulcer medication while he weighs whether to raise prices, cut back employee hours, or rethink his hours of operation?

By Friday morning, crews will be tearing down the GOP convention stage and those crazy screens and banners that hung throughout the Tampa Bay Times Forum. We’ll have forgotten “We Can Change That” and “We Believe in America.” But every day for the next two months, business owners will pull on T-shirts and hang signs on their stores that say “I Built This.” Go ahead, try telling them what their president “meant.”

Yuri Yukuv wrote:
Hey VivaStPauli,

I think this article from a central-left website (Slate) explains partly why "You didnt build that" is not going away, I have heard that argument before many times and I know what it conveys.

Its deeply disturbing to anyone who has worked 7 day weeks at 10 hour days to get where they are.

It also reeks of populism and class warfare.

Maybe these are not important to you as many in europe are still rich because of money leftover from feudalism and/or government corruption

however in the US most of the richer individuals are innovative hardworking entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin, Ray Crock, Warren Buffet and Mitt Romney leader of Bain Capital through 15 years of constant over performance.

VivaStPauli wrote:I agree, but that's not the point.

Allowing same-sex marriage would be a traditionally conservative right-wing thing to do. It's limiting the Governments influence on private life. How in hell fundamentalist Christianity got such a stranglehold on the party of small government is beyond me.

Yes, Reagan, but come on, it's still ridiculous. Republicans should be the party legalizing gay marriage and pot, Democrats should be the party raising taxes and spending. Yet nobody spent bigger than Bush, and the whole love affair between economic liberalism and Christian fundamentalism is just too utterly bizarre.

RedOranje wrote:Serfdom? I'm sorry, but that just invalidates everything there. Absolutely ludicrous.

"Sarah Palin said she could see Russia from Alaska. Mitt Romney talks like he's only seen Russia by watching Rocky IV."

RedOranje wrote:

Ryan.
Ripped.
To.
Shreds.



Screw the current candidates, let's just amend the Constitution and re-elect Bill!





Seriously though, Clinton provided more actual (and factual) information about the Republican platform than the Republicans did, and he blew their rhetoric apart.

I read that article, and I got the point it makes, but that doesn't make it any more true. And here's what's disturbing to me, it is what immideatly follows in your statement, where you completely gloss over the fact that we both know, what the President actually said, yet you continue to assume he meant, what Republicans want him to have said.

Why? What he said isn't. What you want him to have said is. But that's not his fault. He can only be blamed for what he said, not what you guys want to hear. And what's so offensive? To remind business executives that they used roads?

And let's not forget the much broader point: tens of millions of people work 7 day weeks with 10 hour shifts and still didn't get anywhere.

Why? It just doesn't. Not what he actually said. I get that you don't want "big government", but surely you still want infrastructure to exist.

What is it with the right-wing fetish of painting Europe as some kind of medieval backwater? The Feudal system has been dismantled in most European countries about as long, if not longer, than the US has been independet from Britain. I mean, sure, I study at a over 600 year old university, my place of work has been open since the 1130s, and the house I live in was built in the late 18th century, but that doesn't mean we're still ruled by Kaiser Friedrich.

The problem of things being "left over" is perfectly valid for the US too. Why do you think you have dynasties? The Kennedys, Bushes, Kerrys and Romneys are rich as f*ck. Mitt Romney didn't achieve what he did because he's so very very smart, he did it because his f*cking rich dad paid his way through the ivy league, and set him up with a nice startup bundle.

Give me 10 million and I'll make 20 million out of them as well. Getting that first million is the hard part.

Also, you need a swift history lesson about what class warfare actually is. A bit of socially aware economics like all of Europe has doesn't turn you into Communist Russia, class warfare is what happened during the rise of Lenin and Mao, not raising taxes to make education cheaper for the middle class.

That's just crap. Yes, people like Jobs, or Gates, for that matter, built something from basically nothing, but same as in Europe, most of your super-rich people inherited a nice super-rich starter packet from their parents, and built on that success. Just look at dimwits like Trump, who has managed to bankrupt a f*cking Casino - if he didn't have daddy, that guy wouldn't even be fit to flip burgers.


The funny thing is, that in economic upward mobility, as in the chance of poor people to become rich, the US rank well below all those "socialist" European states. Germany, where I live, isn't doing too well in that regard as well, but we're still miles ahead.

You know where the dishwasher-to-millionaire story is most likely to happen? Scandinavia. As in that Scandinavia that has the biggest government spending on social security nets.

And a final prayer on the issue of socialism:

America has to get over themselves. McCarthy is f*cking dead, and should stay dead. The West's problem with the Eastern block never was their socialist views on the economy, it was that they were aggressive, expansive dictatorships.
Lack of freedom is the problem, not the overabundance of social security.

Socialism isn't inherintly bad, dictatorship is. Just look at the Nazis. They were as right-wing, and corporatist as it gets. They loved Big Business. The problem was that it was a genocidal dictatorship. Same with Russia. Who gives a shit about their attitude towards the working class if they suppress free speech, fill their gulags with dissidents and try to establish satellite states everywhere?

Seriously, the right needs to get those deluded talking points off the table and start to act like grown ups.

For me, as a Politics major, and with a rudimentary grasp of world history, the Republican speeches make me cringe. Try formulating a thesis from the base of fact for once, instead of bending the facts to match your agenda.

The United States of Entrepreneurs
America still leads the world

Mar 12th 2009 | from the print edition

FOR all its current economic woes, America remains a beacon of entrepreneurialism. Between 1996 and 2004 it created an average of 550,000 small businesses every month. Many of those small businesses rapidly grow big. The world's largest company, Wal-Mart, was founded in 1962 and did not go public until a decade later; multi-million dollar companies such as Google and Facebook barely existed a decade ago.

America was the first country, in the late 1970s, to ditch managerial capitalism for the entrepreneurial variety. After the second world war J.K. Galbraith was still convinced that the modern corporation had replaced “the entrepreneur as the directing force of the enterprise with management”. Big business and big labour worked with big government to deliver predictable economic growth. But as that growth turned into stagflation, an army of innovators, particularly in the computer and finance industries, exposed the shortcomings of the old industrial corporation and launched a wave of entrepreneurship.

America has found the transition to a more entrepreneurial economy easier than its competitors because entrepreneurialism is so deeply rooted in its history. It was founded and then settled by innovators and risk-takers who were willing to sacrifice old certainties for new opportunities. American schoolchildren are raised on stories about inventors such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison. Entrepreneurs such as Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford are celebrated in monuments all over the place. One of the country's most popular television programmes, currently being recycled as a film, features the USS Enterprise boldly going where no man had gone before.

If anything, America's infatuation with entrepreneurialism has deepened further of late. People like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have all the upsides of Carnegie and Ford without the downsides—the useful products and the open-handed philanthropy without the sweatshops and the massacres. Preachers style themselves as pastorpreneurs. Business books sell in their millions. “When I was in college, guys usually pretended they were in a band,” comments one observer. “Now they pretend they are in a start-up.”

Advantage America

American companies have an unusual freedom to hire and fire workers, and American citizens have an unusual belief that, for all their recent travails, their fate still lies in their own hands. They are comfortable with the risk-taking that is at the heart of entrepreneurialism. The rewards for success can be huge—Google's Mr Brin was a billionaire by the time he was 30—and the punishments for failure are often trivial. In some countries bankruptcy spells social death. In America, particularly in Silicon Valley, it is a badge of honour.

America also has several structural advantages when it comes to entrepreneurship. The first is the world's most mature venture-capital industry. America's first venture fund, the American Research and Development Corporation, was founded in 1946; today the industry has an unrivalled mixture of resources, expertise and customers. Highland Capital Partners receives about 10,000 plausible business plans a year, conducts about 1,000 meetings followed by 400 company visits and ends up making 10-20 investments a year, all of which are guaranteed to receive an enormous amount of time and expertise. IHS Global Insight, a consultancy, calculates that in 2005 companies that were once backed by venture capitalists accounted for nearly 17% of America's GDP and 9% of private-sector employment.

The second advantage is a tradition of close relations between universities and industry. America's universities are economic engines rather than ivory towers, with proliferating science parks, technology offices, business incubators and venture funds. Stanford University gained around $200m in stock when Google went public. It is so keen on promoting entrepreneurship that it has created a monopoly-like game to teach its professors how to become entrepreneurs. About half of the start-ups in the Valley have their roots in the university.

The third advantage is an immigration policy that, historically, has been fairly open. Vivek Wadhwa, of Duke University, notes that 52% of Silicon Valley start-ups were founded by immigrants, up from around a quarter ten years ago. In all, a quarter of America's science and technology start-ups, generating $52 billion and employing 450,000 people, have had somebody born abroad as either their CEO or their chief technology officer. In 2006 foreign nationals were named as inventors or co-inventors in a quarter of American patent applications, up from 7.6% in 1998.

Amar Bhidé, of Columbia University, suggests a fourth reason for America's entrepreneurial success—“venturesome consumers”. Americans are unusually willing to try new products of all sorts, even if it means teaching themselves new skills and eating into their savings; they are also unusually willing to pester manufacturers to improve their products. Apple sold half a million iPhones in its first weekend.

America faces numerous threats to this remarkable entrepreneurial ecology. The legal system can be burdensome, even destructive. One of the biggest new problems comes from “patent trolls”—lawyers who bring cases against companies for violating this or that trumped-up patent. Because the tax system is so complicated, many companies have to devote a lot of time and ingenuity to filling out tax forms that could be better spent on doing business. And the combination of the terrorist attacks on America on September 11th 2001 and rising xenophobia is making the country less open to immigrants.

Today more than 1m people are waiting in line to be granted legal status as permanent residents. Yet only 85,000 visas a year are allocated to the sort of skilled workers the economy needs, and there are caps of 10,000 on the number of visas available for applicants from any one country, so the wait for people from countries with the largest populations, such as India and China, is close to six years.

Yet despite these problems, America plays a vital role in spreading the culture of entrepreneurialism around the world. People the world over admire its ability to produce world-changing entrepreneurs, such as Bill Gates, wealth-creating universities, such as Harvard and Stanford, and world-beating clusters, such as Silicon Valley. Simon Cook, of DFJ Esprit, a venture-capital company, argues that Silicon Valley's most successful export is not Google or Apple but the idea of Silicon Valley itself.

Foreigners who were educated in America's great universities have helped to spread the gospel of entrepreneurialism. Two of Europe's leading evangelists, Sir Ronald Cohen and Bert Twaalfhoven, were both products of HBS. Chinese and Indian entrepreneurs, who cut their teeth in Stanford and Silicon Valley, are now returning home in ever larger numbers, determined to recreate Silicon Valley's magic in Bangalore or Shanghai.

America is putting hard financial muscle behind this soft power. The Kauffman Foundation spends about $90m a year, from assets of about $2.1 billion, to make the case for entrepreneurialism, supporting academic research, training would-be entrepreneurs and sponsoring “Global Entrepreneurship Week”, which last year involved 75 countries. Goldman Sachs is spending $100m over the next five years to promote entrepreneurialism among women in the developing world, particularly through management education.

Old Europe

The other two of the world's three biggest developed economies—the EU and Japan—are far less entrepreneurial. The number of innovative entrepreneurs in Germany, for instance, is less than half that in America, according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), a joint venture between the London Business School and Babson College. And far fewer start-ups in those countries become big businesses. Janez Potocnik, the EU commissioner for science and research, points out that only 5% of European companies created from scratch since 1980 have made it into the list of the 1,000 biggest EU companies by market capitalisation. The equivalent figure for America is 22%.

This reflects different cultural attitudes. Europeans have less to gain from taking business risks, thanks to higher tax rates, and more to lose, thanks to more punitive attitudes to bankruptcy (German law, for example, prevents anyone who has ever been bankrupt from becoming a CEO). When Denis Payre was thinking about leaving a safe job in Oracle to start a company in the late 1980s, his French friends gave him ten reasons to stay put whereas his American friends gave him ten reasons to get on his bike. In January last year Mr Payre's start-up, Business Objects, was sold to Germany's SAP for €4.8 billion.

European egalitarianism, too, militates against entrepreneurialism: the EU is much more interested in promoting small businesses in general than in fostering high-growth companies. The Europeans' appetite for time off does not help. Workers are guaranteed a minimum of four weeks' holidays a year whereas Americans' vacations are much less certain. Europeans are also much more suspicious of business. According to a Eurobarometer poll, 42% of them think that entrepreneurs exploit other people's work, compared with 26% of Americans.

These cultural problems are reinforced by structural ones. The European market remains much more fragmented than the American one: entrepreneurs have to grapple with a patchwork of legal codes and an expensive and time-consuming patent system. In many countries the tax system and the labour laws discourage companies from growing above a certain size. A depressing number of European universities remain suspicious of industry, subsisting on declining state subsidies but still unwilling to embrace the private sector.

The European venture-capital industry, too, is less developed than the American one (significantly, in many countries it is called “risk” capital rather than “venture” capital). In 2005, for example, European venture capitalists invested €12.7 billion in Europe whereas American venture capitalists invested €17.4 billion in America. America has at least 50 times as many “angel” investors as Europe, thanks to the taxman's greater forbearance.

Yet for all its structural and cultural problems, Europe has started to change, not least because America's venture capitalists have recently started to export their model. In the 1990s Silicon Valley's moneybags believed that they should invest “no further than 20 miles from their offices”, but lately the Valley's finest have been establishing offices in Asia and Europe. This is partly because they recognise that technological breakthroughs are being made in many more places, but partly also because they believe that applying American methods to new economies can start a torrent of entrepreneurial creativity.

Between 2003 and 2006 European venture-capital investment grew by an average of 23% a year, compared with just 0.3% a year in America. Indeed, three European countries, Denmark, Sweden and Britain, have bigger venture-capital industries, in relation to the size of their economies, than America. Venture-capital-backed start-ups have produced more than 100 “exits” (stockmarket flotations or sales to established companies) worth more than $100m since 2004. Tele Atlas, a Dutch mapping outfit, was recently bought by TomTom for $4.3 billion.

The success of Skype, which pioneered internet-based telephone calls, was a striking example of the new European entrepreneurialism. The company was started by a Swede and a Dane who contracted out much of their work to computer programmers in Estonia. In 2005 they sold it to eBay for $2.6 billion.

Several European universities have become high-tech hubs. Britain's Cambridge, for example, has spawned more than 3,000 companies and created more than 200 millionaires in the university. The accession of ten eastern European countries to the EU has also tapped into an internal European supply of scientists and technologists who are willing to work for a small fraction of the cost of their pampered western neighbours.

Slowcoach Japan

The Japanese can hardly be accused of aversion to long hours. Big Japanese companies have an impressive record of incremental improvement, particularly in the electronics business. But for the most part the Japanese have been less successful than the Europeans at adapting to entrepreneurial capitalism. The latest GEM global report gives Japan the lowest score for entrepreneurship of any big country, placing it joint bottom with Greece. The brightest people want to work for large companies, with which the big banks work hand in glove, or for the government. Risk capital is rare. Bankruptcy is severely punished. And the small-business sector is wrapped in cotton wool, encouraging “replicative” rather than “innovative” behaviour. Over the past quarter-century the rate at which Japan has been creating new businesses has been only one-third to half that in America.

RedOranje wrote:The inclusion of the term "Serfs" and reference of any type of institution akin to it in the US is nothing more than hyperbolic rhetoric with absolutely no basis in fact. It's lazy pandering and fear mongering and those resorting to that are quite frankly not worth the time it takes to listen to their propaganda.