So yes, some of the rich did get there illegitimately.

In fact, Obama's notion of entrepreneurs has surely been shaped by the fact that spending one's adult life as a community organizer, a state legislator, and a United States senator results in your being surrounded by relatively more rich people who deserves little of what they have: The ones who got rich via political connections rather than talent in free-market capitalism. Tony Rezko didn't build his business all on his own. He had help from people in government!

When campaigning in 2008, Obama explicitly argued that the American system required systemic reform as a precondition for fair outcomes. After being elected, he abandoned any real effort to fundamentally change the system, and proceeded to work on enacting reforms within it. I'd love to see Obama achieve systemic tax reform that ends the advantages the rich gain from complexity and access. Instead he's focused on the "within the system" reform of raising rates on the rich. Given the alarming fiscal situation we're in there's a case to be made that doing so is necessary. But it's a suboptimal course, and there should be no illusions about that.

Having railed against the ill-gotten gains of lobbyists in 2008, Obama hasn't really found a way to tame them. Obama's inclination to micromanage the economy with subsidies to specific firms all but guarantees capital will keep flowing to the wealthy and well-connected rather than the most efficient uses. There's been no real attempt at reforming Wall Street in a way that gets rid of the incentive for financial transactions that create neither efficiency nor value to anyone other than traders. And Obama generally favors policies that make America's tax, regulatory, and health-care systems more complicated and reliant on the discretion of corruptible bureaucracies.

All of this is to say that there are a lot of ill-gotten riches in America. But there is little focus on reforms that would remedy that huge, seemingly intractable problem. Instead, a public upset over the perception of ill-gotten gains is used in service of efforts to raise taxes on the rich generally. If that effort succeeds, more serious inequities and inefficiencies will remain unaddressed. Meanwhile the sort of politically connected businesspeople that Obama knows will still have more money than is their due; and the entrepreneur who makes the bulk of his money creating actual value will be left thinking that Obama's overall approach to this issue is unfair to him or her.

That honest entrepreneur will be right.

