Obama Hates the Dream

Here is John Kass of the Chicago Tribune on President Obama's recent bashing of entrepreneurs.  It begins with a beautiful, gritty story of Kass's father's long days in his grocery store, and ends as a brilliant response to Obama and his progressivist ideology.

I was inclined from the beginning to give Obama the benefit of the doubt when he said

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,

I was pretty sure his "You didn't build that," meant the "American system," or the "roads and bridges," not the "business."  Though it exhibits a fundamental misunderstanding of the sources of both our economic and physical infrastructure, it was mostly a clumsy construction.

What was astounding to me was the overarching antipathy for entrepreneurs his speech exhibited.  Some of you who have known me to be a small business owner and among the ranks of the self employed for almost 25 years now have called or written to ask how it feels to be hated by the President and his base.

But it's far more than the successful entrepreneurs they hate.  They hate the entrepreneur's dream.  And they hate everyone who ever dreamed it.

That's a lot of people, because nearly everyone who has ever worked in the private sector, at one time or another has dreamed of running his or her own business and being his or her own boss.  So Obama's lashing out at those business owners and trashing those who make the dream real is nothing other than a vicious slashing at the dream itself.

Even those who didn't try the dream still remember and cherish it.  Many think they didn't try because they couldn't afford the risk, or they feared failure too much, or knew their own inadequacies too well, or feared the hard work or the mooching protection racket of the City Hall inspectors John Kass describes.

But they still remember the dream.  And it doesn't sound right to them that all that was required for them to realize the dream was the wonderful American system and the public works infrastructure that everyone had.