Perhaps the most perfect rant, from commenter Voluble in Andy's earlier Preference Cascade post. Me and a few other morons talked about it some today.

Presented without additional commentary, because it needs none.

129 As a small business owner all I can say is that I think the current sentiment in the small business community is that we didn't sign up for this shit. Y'all can vote for whatever the hell you want but we are not going to be a part of it.

I have seen more owners get out of the business or retire in the past couple of years than ever before and with the ACA on the horizon the jobs these businesses produced will not be replaced. The economics no longer work. This is why unemployment is always so high in socialist countries. What you have to go through to have employees is just brutal.

But here's the thing about what Obama said --- he has it exactly backwards. The government didn't build any of that shit he is talking about --- we built it. We are the ones who paid for it. Not only did we build our businesses we built the schools and the roads and everything else he thinks was generated out of thin air. If you want to get technical about it the businesses and taxpayers that came along before we did built it all and now we are building what comes next.

And not only that, but we did it with the albatross of a predatory, corrupt and overbearing government hanging around our necks at every juncture.

And now we have had enough.

I haven't made more than $50k from my business but one or two years of the past 15. But now that it is time to cash out after providing literally hundreds of jobs I get the stink eye and get castigated for being a member of the 1%. Even though I can remember sitting on the edge of the bed and holding my head in my hands wondering what I had done risking everything I had to create a business and wondering how it would all work out when I had just finished working several days in a row with no sleep... I am the enemy. Even though I didn't take a paycheck for the first year of the business and later skipped other paychecks to meet payroll or to pay taxes I am somehow at fault for the fact that all of these people sitting on their asses or working their cushy government jobs with the large pensions funded by armies of tax collectors and regulators may have to go without.

Well, I already went without so they can bloody well shut the fuck up and take their turn in the barrel! If they want to risk everything they have or work their asses off with no guarantee of success only to be told at the end that they were not responsible for their own success and don't deserve their rewards then they are welcome to go down that path and see what it is like. But the number of people who will pursue the American dream and build the economy from the roots up will be greatly decreased in the current atmosphere and all of these self-entitled idiots will sit around wondering why the government is still going broke and why no one is hiring.

No country can survive socialism. It just doesn't happen. Sooner or later the bill comes due. But before it does you always get demagogic idiots like Obama, or Chavez who try to blame their failures on the only people who are keeping everything afloat. It is not enough they sank the damn ship... they have to come after the people in the life boats too.

That is the sort of mentality we are dealing with.

Posted by: Voluble at August 18, 2012 12:58 PM (qYvEa)