If you've been unsuccessful, you didn't do that on your own

Mark Perry of the Carpe Diem blog touched on the subject briefly a few days ago in response to of course the wise and always subjugating rhetoric of one President Barack Obama. 

In not so many words, President Obama said, if you've been successful in this country, you didn't get their on your own, someone else helped you, alluding to that, "someone" being the government. While I agree some of what the President has said in the past on this subject could be taken out of context, its hard to ignore his stance on what government's role should be, or in his eyes; what government's role is.  

Here's my take on the role government has played in the lives of so many entrepreneurs and business owners I know. If you’ve been unsuccessful, you didn’t get there on your own. If you were unsuccessful at opening or operating a small business, some government official along the way probably contributed to your failure. There was an overzealous civil servant somewhere who might have stood in your way with unreasonable regulations that are part of our American system of anti-business red tape that allowed you to not thrive. Taxpayers invested in roads and bridges, but you might have faced city council members suffering from a Napoleon Complex who wouldn’t allow you to use them. If you’ve been forced to close a business, it’s often the case that you didn’t do that on your own. Someone else made that business closing happen or prevented it from opening in the first place. You can thank the bureaucratic tyrants of the nanny state. You can thank a government who believes only they can solve the crisis, only they can fix the economy, only THEY can protect you.

This of course, coming after we had eight years of government who believed zero regulation was needed, leading us into the worst economic period since the great depression. Yes, BOTH Democrats and Republicans are responsible for the mess. Roads and bridges are wonderful, but those roads and bridges were being built long before small businesses were forced to pay a "candle" tax at their bar or restaurant in order to pay for them. For long I have been under attack, as people over the years have questioned; Matt, what are you? Are you a republican, are you a democrat? Oh Matt, you're not supporting Ron Paul are you? What happened to you Matt, I thought you voted for Obama? I have and will always continue to be a pragmatic, liberty loving, extreme moderate. There's something about another American thinking for themselves and not identifying a party affiliation or declaring an ideology that makes others who are too intellectually weak to think for themselves uncomfortable. Its because of this that we are forced to choose only between two parties, and two candidates, who are much similar to each other on policy then either side wishes to freely admit. True, their personal stories are far different from one another, but this is not, nor should electing a President ever be a popularity contest.

My solution for all this? I wish I had one that made sense to a growing population of Americans who have come to expect government to solve all of their problems while the people creating their own path are trying to figure out a way for the government to get the hell out of their way! If you want to know why the country we live in today is so divided, so segmented, so sharply different, then look no further than the thin red line which has been drawn between two parties which have equally contributed to this mess. If you look closely enough, you'll see millions of Americans standing on that line, unwilling to cross to either side because they're smart enough not to trust anyone associated with the words; Republican, Democrat, Political, Party, President, Congressman, Senator, or Government.

The unfortunate part, those people will continue to stand there, will continue to be drowned out by the endless noise both sides make at each other. And while they stand there, the last bit of hope pragmatic Americans hold, is that everyone else leaves at least something left, so that we can pick up the pieces and start over after the rest of you have finished trying to destroy everything else. Then again, even if the pragmatic ones do fix this country, I'm sure someone else will come along to remind us, it wasn't really us in the first place.  It never is.