Obama's Logical Fallacy on Entrepreneurship

          President Obama's statement last week attacking entrepreneurship has received more notoriety than anything else by any candidate so far in the selection. In case you have been on vacation in Antarctica, he made two ridiculous statements that he has been trying to explain away ever since. These were "look, if you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own" and "if you got a business – you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen." Numerous commenters have noted that these demonstrate President Obama's lack of understanding of American business and his disdain for people who work hard to create their own enterprises.

             Obama and the Democrats have been trying to walk these words back ever since, complaining that they have been taken out of context, and that he was really talking about the investments made by the government that benefit everybody. So you can decide on your own, I quote the whole two paragraphs:

“There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me -- because they want to give something back.  They know they didn’t -- look, 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.” 

    “ If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.  There was a great teacher somewhere in your life.  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.  The Internet didn’t get invented on its own.  Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.”

But Obama's explanations fail to explain why some people become entrepreneurs and others are not successful. Rather, he has engaged in the "Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc” fallacy. Because someone becomes a successful entrepreneur after the government has built the roads or the Internet, it does not follow he became successful because of those roads. The roads or the Internet did not make entrepreneurs successful – they succeeded because their own individual initiative.

 The roads or the Internet are a common good, available to everybody. If they are what is necessary for someone to become an entrepreneur, then anybody could become successful.  Obviously, it is some other reason than the availability of government resources, or even the benefit of a great teacher, that enabled individuals to create success. Most Americans recognize that their success depends on their own individual ability and initiative; President Obama's language establishes that he does not believe this.

Charles Krauthammer, in his column this week, also recognizes that Obama's argument is fallacious, although he points to a different fallacy. He states "to say all individuals are embedded in and the product of society is banal. Obama rises above banality by means of fallacy: equating society with government, the collectivity with the state. Of course we are shaped by our milieu. But the most formative, most important  influence on the individual is not government. It is civil society, those elements of the collectivity that lie outside government:… The voluntary associations that Tocqueville understood to be genius of America have the source of its energy and freedom."

 By the way, Obama's claim that government research created the Internet generated rebuttal in an interesting Wall Street Journal column.