When former President Obama was running for re-election in 2012, he made his famous “You Didn’t Build That” speech in Roanoke, Virginia. I blogged about it back in August 2012 and got almost a record number of comments.

Obama was right if all he meant is that in building your business, you need roads and bridges that taxes paid for. But if you look at the speech, you’ll see that the famous statement about 'not building that' comes right after a whole section in which he’s trying to justify letting the Bush tax cuts expire for the top 2 percent. In short, he wants to raise tax rates on the top 2 percent. Immediately after discussing taxes, he states the following:

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. (Applause) 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.

Why rehash this now? Because Cato policy analyst Derek Bonett has a particularly nice way of laying out what’s wrong with Obama’s thinking. He does it with his “Tale of Two Commuters.” Here’s an excerpt: