"You didn't build that..."

Did Mitt Romney, Jack Gilchrist and other business owners build the roads and bridges their products or personnel move on.  Did they pay for the education and training of their workers?  What the inspectors who ensure that the foods they eat meet some minimum standard?  How about the police and fire services that keep them safe, not to mention the military?  How about the subsidies for the fuels they use and crops they consume?  I am sure they would say, yes, they paid for this in the taxes they pay, but then I helped pay for them, too.  Such is the commitment all Americans have made to support the growth, wealth and security of our nation and the free enterprise system.

We all love the idea that we are self-made and self-sufficient, that we need no one and no one helped us, that our success is solely the work of our own hands or those of our ancestors.  We romanticize the "Rugged Individualist".  But in truth this has always been in the context of "One Nation...indivisible" and "Out of many, one".

Yes, Mr. Gilchrist, his son and father have worked hard to be where they are, the initiative, the ingenuity.  Acknowledging that this might not have been possible all on your own, in a country that did not provide a context that promotes and supports such effort, is not to denigrate such accomplishment.  It is to suggest that each of us owes at least some debt to the country that supports our efforts.  America, as a nation, has worked alongside you, worked hard and sacrificed, contributed to provide the opportunity, the infrastructure needed, to help hard workers like you and many others succeed.  It is no denigration of your efforts to suggest that they have been joined by your fellow Americans, by government funded by all of our citizens that arises from the shared will of the people to provide for such opportunity.

That I drive to work on roads that were built by and are owned by all of us, not by a corporation that can say "This is mine" and set an arbitrary toll that I must pay to survive may seem a small thing.  That my customers can do the same may seem trivial and easily taken for granted - in a land that has become more and more "All about me".  But your employees also enjoy this, as do your products.  Yes, I succeed by my own efforts - no one earned my degree for me or the position I hold, but the military benefits I earned and the student loans I used made it possible - and I know that all contribute in support of those.  No, they could not succeed for me, but I also know that it would have likely been impossible without them.  I did not earn it without help.

Neither did you build it on your own.  This selfish, self-centered, "I did this with no help from anyone else" attitude is simply not based on the real world.