FOUNDING FATHERS YOU DIDNT BUILD THAT

FOUNDING FATHERS YOU DIDN'T BUILD THAT When President Obama said at a rally earlier month that "if you'vebeen successful, you didn't get there on your own … if you've got a business, you didn't build that," he started a political firestorm, and an opposing "I built that" campaign from Mitt Romney. But it turns out Obama didn't build that argument from scratch, either. And his commentsseem to be closer to the foundingfathers' principles than opponents might like to believe. As noticed by Reddit , Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine, two men who literally built the country, expressed similar sentiments in the 1700s. And, reading the passages suggests that they wouldn't take all the credit for founding the country, either. In a Christmas Day letter to Robert Morris in 1783, Franklin wrote that "the remissness of ourpeople in paying taxes is highly blameable," and that "all property…seems to me to be the creature of public convention." He continues: "All the Property that is necessaryto a man, for the conservation of the individual and the propagation of the species, is his natural right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all property superfluous to such purposes is the property of the publick, who, by their laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it, whenever the welfare of thepublick shall demand such disposition. He that does not like civil society on these terms, let him retire and live among savages." Paine, in 1795's Agrarian Justice , puts it even more bluntly:"Personal property is the effect ofsociety; and it is as impossible foran individual to acquire personal property without the aid of society, as it is for him to make land originally." "Separate an individual from society, and give him an island ora continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property.He cannot be rich," he writes. Obama, Franklin, and Paine say it's OK to become rich through hard work—just don't trample on the people who helped make it happen. In the everlasting words of one Mister Spock, "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."more history on nigeria famous tripe check out www.ollynation.wordpress.com