Are People Who Start Businesses the Same as Those Who Don’t? The President’s Controversial Comments Debated on The O’Reilly Factor
During a campaign stop in Virginia recently, President Obama told the crowd, “If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.”
He went on to say, “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.”
Tonight on The O’Reilly Factor, Mary Katherine Ham called his comments “disturbing” and said, “I think occasionally you get a glimpse of what Obama, who I think is a committed liberal, actually believes. And this sets up a philosophy: if you build a business, you didn’t build that.”
She said President Obama “is staking a claim for the government and for everybody else in society on the successes that business people have built, that they have taken risks to build, and so thereby saying well what you earn is not actually yours.”
Bill O’Reilly countered, “But isn’t it true that all of us who are successful owe something to our country for providing the structure in which we can bloviate on my part, okay, or sell our products to people who have money to buy them if you’re a merchant. Isn’t that true, that you have to think about how much do I owe on a give back basis, isn’t that legitimate point?”
Ham answered, “What it sounds like to me is that we are here to serve the government and that it is allowing us to thrive. And that is not the way Americans feel about the system nor is it how it should work.”
Juan Williams replied that it’s the set of laws and infrastructure that is why people want to come to the US to start businesses. “The idea that we should be proud of America and invest in America is not controversial,” said Williams.
O’Reilly responded that it may be a matter of degree, meaning how much we owe the government. Where Williams is going wrong in his argument, said O’Reilly, is that “Government didn’t build the Factor, I built the Factor. All right, and the government didn’t help my education. I paid every nickel of my education ... Barack Obama did nothing for me, zero. So while the structure helped me, it was my upbringing number one, and my education, private education that I paid for, number two, that led to my success.”
Ham had the last word, “The whole thing is a ‘duh’ statement. Like, yes of course there are systems we have put in place as a voting public that work to help businesses. That’s what we’re supposed to do. You can both be proud of that system and also acknowledge that it takes special, talented, hardworking, brave people to start businesses. They are not the same as people who do not start businesses and you need to honor that and honor those skills.”
