Lis­ten­ing to the RNC rhetoric, I thought: I could be the poster child for the ​“We Built It” theme. With­out inher­it­ed wealth, with­out finan­cial bank­ing, I found­ed a small busi­ness in 1984 on my wits alone that I have run con­tin­u­ous­ly and suc­cess­ful­ly for the past 28 years.

Campaign rhetoric is to be expected, but let's not let it cloud our minds. The partnership of American business and government has been a good one, in which personal ingenuity is allowed full realization by public investment in education, roads, bridges, research and technology.

The Repub­li­cans appear to think so, too, as they call me at least once a month ask­ing for mon­ey and spout­ing some screed about Oba­ma’s secret Mus­lim plot.

How­ev­er, like Chris Christie’s, my mom­ma always told me to face the truth, and the truth is that I – like every­one else in this coun­try – am not the sole author of my accomplishments.

My busi­ness depends on my read­ing, writ­ing and think­ing skills, all of which I gained in pub­lic schools– schools fought for by our fore­fa­thers and moth­ers to ensure an informed elec­torate that could counter the sway and priv­i­lege of inher­it­ed wealth. It’s true that my par­ents paid for my edu­ca­tion at pri­vate col­leges, but my broth­er was – and I could have been – edu­cat­ed at one of the many pub­lic state and land uni­ver­si­ties that, for most of the 20th cen­tu­ry, ensured that Amer­i­ca was one of the most edu­cat­ed nations in the world.

My ini­tial and cur­rent employ­ees were also edu­cat­ed not at my expense, but by the pub­lic. Most attend­ed pub­lic schools through­out their edu­ca­tion­al lives, from kinder­garten through col­lege, and many relied on pub­licly financed loans to afford fur­ther high­er education.

I set up shop rely­ing on the pub­licly financed and con­struct­ed U.S. mail sys­tem and tele­phone grid to com­mu­ni­cate with clients. And when my busi­ness was rev­o­lu­tion­ized by com­put­ers and then by the Inter­net, it was the gov­ern­ment invest­ment in mil­i­tary and intel­li­gence research to which I owed my grat­i­tude. My busi­ness ben­e­fits from the pub­lic roads and bridges on which I dri­ve. I rely on the pub­licly financed Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion Admin­is­tra­tion to ensure that the planes on which I fly, fly safe­ly. I have nev­er tak­en any of this for granted.

When I was in col­lege, it was often implied that inhab­i­tants of the ​“third world” (i.e. Latin Amer­i­ca, the Mid­dle East, Africa) lacked the dri­ve of Euro­peans or Amer­i­cans. I’ve lived in Latin Amer­i­ca and vis­it­ed many oth­er regions of the Glob­al South, and in none did I wit­ness inno­va­tion and social mobil­i­ty being stymied by a lack of cre­ativ­i­ty or dri­ve; rather economies and peo­ple were imped­ed by the lack of infra­struc­ture and edu­ca­tion. It is the pub­lic infra­struc­ture that sup­ports entre­pre­neur­ship, that sup­ports social mobil­i­ty, that drew our fore­fa­thers here from for­eign lands (and yes, that is true of all of us except Native Amer­i­cans), and that con­tin­ues to draw the most entre­pre­neur­ial folks – doc­u­ment­ed or undoc­u­ment­ed – from across the world today.

Ann and Mitt Rom­ney’s grand­par­ents, too, start­ed busi­ness­es and hired work­ers they did­n’t have to edu­cate and used roads they did­n’t have to build. Chris Christie’s mom too rode bus­es financed by the pub­lic to ensure work­er trans­porta­tion to and from busi­ness­es, who them­selves ben­e­fit­ed from the pub­lic tran­sit and the roads.

Cam­paign rhetoric is to be expect­ed, but let’s not let it cloud our minds. The part­ner­ship of Amer­i­can busi­ness and gov­ern­ment has been a good one, in which per­son­al inge­nu­ity is allowed full real­iza­tion by pub­lic invest­ment in edu­ca­tion, roads, bridges, research and tech­nol­o­gy. Our tax dol­lars for edu­ca­tion, for health care, for infra­struc­ture are not char­i­ty or extor­tion; they are the foun­da­tion of our col­lec­tive wealth. Yes, ​“We Built It.” But the ​“we” in this case is not just we entre­pre­neurs, but the We who togeth­er con­sti­tute these Unit­ed States.