"You Didn't Build it"

      President Obama seemed to say that entrepreneurs do not deserve any special credit, or payment, for starting and building businesses because they could not have done so without the ingenuity and work of a multitude of discoverers, inventors, suppliers of goods and services and builders of roads. 

     He's right, of course, and that applies all the way back in time.  People no longer living had to invent the wheel, the printing press, the steam engine, the telephone, the gasoline engine and on and on in order for folks like Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford, Bill Gates et al., to endow the world with their inventions and discoveries. Therefore, what, they do not deserve to receive exceptional compensation?

     If you either work for someone else or for yourself you expect to be paid not for the sum total of human enterprise going back to the wheel but for the incremental value of your contribution to that total.  

If you happen to be Thomas Edison, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey or Walt Disney the value of your incremental addition is substantial and will be compensated so long as, and to the degree that, there is a marketplace demand for what you have to offer.

     This has nothing to do with whether you are a jolly good fellow, a scoundrel, or Saint Bernadette, which can be addressed by society in other ways.  Therefore, the reasoning of Barack Obama is defective, misleading and in the longer run, dangerous.