There’s been much written in the days since Obama made the smug and revealing claim that those of you who’ve worked 24/7 to build a successful business didn’t really do so, that somehow it’s the government who’s responsible for your success; or, through its divine beneficence, allowed you to succeed. This piece, by Elizabeth Scalia, may be the best analysis I’ve yet read of Obama’s utter ignorance of our free market system … and what it means to be an American:

If anyone doubted that Obama has no idea who Americans are, their doubt had to be dissolved this weekend, when he attempted to minimize the accomplishments of ordinary Americans by essentially claiming that any dreams we have dared to dream, and successes we have made of ourselves through toil, sweat and sacrifice, ought rightly be credited to the government.

I don’t think Obama understands that when he attacked Americans who take pride in their work and for whom “work” and “ambition” means something beyond the material — because it draws on itself from a place of personal dreaming and individual energy — he shot a most disrespectful and destructive arrow, and it hit a place in the American psyche wherein resides whole notions of identity and dignity. In a couple of sentences, he blithely devalued the whole “can-do, American” idea of working hard toward “something better”, something beyond the tax bills and essential utilities. Possibly he doesn’t understand it because he has never worked for a small business, has never drawn a paycheck from the private sector, and has always surrounded himself with those who disdain it, who think they know more about farming than the man who farms, more about establishing a business and creating jobs than the woman who has done it. Just before his “you didn’t build that”, remarks, post-American Obama paid lip-service to past-American dreaming, past-American can-doing by mentioning the moon — toward which we can no longer travel from our own launch pads — and Hoover Dam, an endeavor which this president (with a breathtaking lack of irony or self-awareness) and his environmentalist stormtroopers would never allow to be undertaken.

Whether he intended to or not, what Obama did last weekend was look at the American people and sneer, “you’re nothing. You’ve built nothing, accomplished nothing, invented nothing, cured nothing, solved nothing, fixed nothing, except as the government has permitted.”

The president who thinks Americans are nothing wants them to re-elect him, so he can continue to tell them to put their rights and their dreams away, because the government has dreams enough; to stop thinking there is anything “special” about themselves because it’s the government that is “special”. He is telling Americans to quit believing that anything resides within them that has not been put there by the government, that there is anything they can actually do, that the government will not do better.

Make sure you go here and read the entire piece.  It’s excellent.

(h/t conservativemama)