Tom Smith of RightCoast extends President Barack Hussein Obama's (D) you didn't build that business alone revealing statement and then flips it, discussing those businesses that haven't been built.

Big surprize. If you build anything, you can absolutely bet people will line up for the credit, like Al Gores for the internet. Failure, you can keep the credit for that.

But here's the question to ask -- how many more successful businesses, inventions, products, services, toys, tools, insights, and just plain fun would there be, if government did not in the first place make it so ridiculously difficult to start a business and keep it going? I don't see our young president taking credit on behalf of the state for all the failures it help cause, all the ideas that never got off the ground because the regulatory hurdles were so high, or all the established companies that never had to face competition because they had managed to get their rents written into law. This is part of the seen and not seen insight of Bastiat. What you see is a successful business when it manages to survive, and then people run up, the same people who taxed and regulated it nearly to death, and say I helped! I helped! What you don't see are all the businesses that perished or never got started because of the heavy hand of the state. And it's a very heavy hand.

Yeah, the state provides public goods we all use, but could they do it any worse? (snip)

It's obvious, but still worth saying -- for our young President to suggest that government deserves some large part of the credit for the acheivements of business founders who manage, in spite of it all, to start a business and make of a go of it, is deeply, deeply perverse. What it ought to get credit for are all the unseen businesses, no longer here or never to be, that it is responsible for.

Of course, on the perversely bright side, with "all the unseen businesses, no longer here or never to be" Obama loses the opportunity to seize some/most of the profits through taxes in order to "spread the wealth around."

hat tip: Instapundit