Who Really Builds A Business

Who Really Builds A Business?

Recently, our President made the comment that if you are an entrepreneur and own a small business, you didn't build it yourself.  He made the comment in an attempt to show the importance of infrastructure and other government services such as public schooling.  Instead, he gave us a revealing glimpse into his world-view and the role he believes our government plays in job creation and the private sector.
Mr. Obama argues that if it weren't for infrastructure like roads, rail, and ports, then private businesses would not be able to so easily transport goods and services and would therefore not exist.  He also puts forth the theory that teachers are a motivating force that spark the entrepreneurial spirit of kids that go on to become tomorrow's business owners.  I will show that Mr. Obama suffers from an inability to properly assign causality to these issues and how that effects his policy that has restrained growth while in office.
Let's start with the argument that teachers are the motivating force behind entrepreneurs and therefore the U.S. economy.  For the record, my dad is an eighth grade math teacher and I have the ultimate respect for what these public servants do on a daily basis.  However, it is a leap too far to say that teachers are the causal factor in an individual's decision to pursue a business venture of their own creation.  After all, entrepreneurs have existed long before public schooling, and many autodidacts have gone on to be fantastic titans of industry.  Andrew Carnegie did not have a teacher that showed him how to create steel and told him to use it to transform the history of our country and cities across the world.  Steve Jobs wrote to two other entrepreneurs, Hewlitt and Packard, to ask for the parts necessary to build his own computer without the poking or prodding of a teacher.  Don't get me wrong; teachers do a great deal to inspire children and young adults to pursue their dreams and expose them to dreams they may not have even thought of on their own, but they do not create entrepreneurs out of mindless drones.
Now let us move on to the idea that without infrastructure, industry would cease to exist.  Again Mr. Obama is putting the cart in front of the horse here.  Before there were ports, roads, electrical grids, or railways young enterprising men and women came to the new world for a chance to create their own destiny. Let's look at the flow of capital as further evidence of whether the government creates industry or industry supports government and infrastructure.  In order for the government to build infrastructure, they need revenue.  Where does this revenue come from?  It comes from a couple sources; individuals through the individual income tax and businesses through the corporate income tax.  If all the businesses in the U.S. were to board up their doors tomorrow and not employ a single person or sell a single good or service there would cease to be revenue for the government to function.  If the government instead were to tear up all the roads, rail, electrical grids and everything else under their complete control, businesses would adapt and continue to exist.  Would it be a difficult transition?  Yes.  Would it be the end of entrepreneurs?  No.
This doesn't even mention the fact that the government is using capital that was created and accumulated by the private sector in order to create the infrastructure that exists today.  Before the government built roads, pioneers cleared paths and used horses and other beasts of burden to transport goods.  Before airports were even dreamed of, the Wright brothers used their entrepreneurial spirit to claim the sky as their own.  The private sector has always found a way to meet demands that exist in the market, regardless of whether infrastructure existed or not.  Infrastructure and governments don't create businesses.  Businesses create the capital that allows a government to exist.
I'm a big fan of analogies so I want to give a few that I think show the error in Mr. Obama's line of thinking.  Without medicine, there would be no doctors.  Without machines, there would be no mechanics.  If it weren't for books, trees would disappear from our planet.  It doesn't work in any of these relationships, and it doesn't work the way Mr. Obama asserts no matter how loud he shouts it.
What does it mean for us that we have a President that believes the car drives the driver?  Perhaps the most obvious implication is the role the government plays in our lives.  If our leaders believe they exist only because we allow them to and they thrive because of our success, then individual freedoms, property rights, contract law and all the other necessities of a successful free market are protected.  When we have a President like our current one, we see things like the auto sector failed bailout where contract law is completely nullified in order to serve the interests of a particular group that helped the President gain office.  We see things like the individual mandate where the government says they know what's best for you much like a parent would for a three year old.  We see things like Solyndra where resources are taken from the free market and given to a special interest group that tries to create a product that isn't technologically efficable at a price that the free market wouldn't support.  Perhaps Solyndra would still be in business if every home owner with electricity was required to buy their product.
The issue isn't that Solyndra failed, it is that it failed with money that was given to them unilaterally by a government that took the money from those who created it in the first place.  The issue is that our President believes this is how advances are made in the private sector - only with the help of government subsidies and handouts will businesses succeed.  Only by taxing businesses in order to build more infrastructure will businesses be able to generate larger profits.  Only by exerting more goverment control will we all be free to prosper.
In four months we will choose who our President will be for the next four years.  We will also be selecting our congressmen and senators.  Perhaps more importantly, we will tell our government officials who we think we are and who they are in the causal relationship of society and government.  Do we believe we are subjects that exist because of the benevolence of the ruling government, or do believe that we are sovereign individuals who work, toil, sweat, and bleed to create a better life for ourselves and those we will leave behind and the government exists only because we say it does.

Evolution, God, and exclusive disjunction

All too often in this world we want to define things in a way that fits into a black or white, right or wrong, up or down definition.  When we do this we can fall victim to wrongly using exclusive disjunction in our arguments and decision making.  Exclusive disjunctions place constraints on arguments that may not always be true or necessary.  For example, if it is sunny outside it cannot be raining.  It is sunny, therefore it cannot be raining.  As anyone who has lived in Florida will tell you, it most certainly can be raining while you are getting a sun tan.

If all wrong-headed use of this argument structure were as trivial as the example I gave, there wouldn't be much se in this article.  However, I can't count the number of times I've come across this argument when discussing the existence of God or evolution with someone.  It shocks me how many times someone tries to use the existence of one to disprove the existence of the other, without the slightest concession that both could coexist.  The argument is either "God is real and therefore evolution cannot be real" or "evolution is real and therefore God cannot exist."  It saddens me that people have used this argument in such a way and cheapened the quest for truth of scientists or discarded the omnipotent power of God.

To give a little background on myself so you can judge my biases coming in to this article, I will say that I have been brought up in a christian home my entire life, I believe in God, and try to live my life according to His teachings in the Bible.  I also have a bachelor's degree in microbiology and cell science from the University of Florida and worked in two research labs while I attended the school in Gainesville.
I'm writing this article in the hopes that I can convince someone who has refused to believe in God because they believe in evolution that the two are not mutually exclusive.  And to convince someone who distrusts or refuses to believe scientists and evolution because they believe doing so will discredit the existence of God that they can broaden their horizons and allow God out of the box they've constructed for Him.  Hopefully, this will lead to more constructive conversations about the subject and create tolerance and a quest to know God better.

First, let's look at the evidence of evolution.  We have fossil records that go back tens of millions of years before any evidence of human existence.  The methods used to date these fossils have been designed, tested, and validated by the same process that allows us to harness the power of atoms into usable electricity.  I have no reason to doubt that dinosaurs walked the earth or that life on earth started as single-cell organisms.
Now let's look at how this information fits pretty conveniently into the creation story from Genesis.  We're told the universe was void and all that existed was God and He created the heavens and the earth - sounds like a symbolic rendering of the big bang to me.  Let there be light, separation of water and sky, development of land, vegetation, then animals, and then man - matches up pretty nicely with how scientist explain us coming to be here right?

So here's my point on not putting God into a box.  If you believe that God is truly all-powerful and that His will is greater than anything we can fathom and supersedes anything else, why couldn't God create us by using evolution as the mechanism?  If God is truly who we say He is, doesn't He get to choose His own methods?  Also, believing the Bible is true doesn't take away from our argument here either: nowhere in Genesis does it say "and then some chance mutations took place and God said 'whoops, guess I'll have to do something with that at some point'."  God is the creator, whether natural selection, genetic mutations, or magic potions were his tools, it does not take away from the fact that He is still God.

This isn't post-modernism trying to diminish God.  This is an attempt to allow God to exist inside of science.  Galileo is quoted as saying "Mathematics is the language with which God wrote the universe."  I would argue that all of science - mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, etc. are all the language of God and as we learn more about the inner-workings of our universe it should not diminish our thoughts of God, but instead fill us with more awe and reverence for the being that created such perfect and intricate systems.