INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: President’s Attack On Success Shows U.S. Falling, Not Rising.

In a speech on July 13 in Roanoke, Va., President Obama said this about successful people:

“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 hard-working people out there. … If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.”

Why limit the discussion to the United States?

Everywhere on our planet, there are smart and hard-working people striving for success and a decent life. Like in the United States, every country has people building roads and using these roads to get to places of work; some people are good teachers, some are good farmers, etc. Most human societies have the same general components.

I am sure Barack Obama saw plenty of smart and hard-working people in Indonesia, where he lived as a child. Why is Indonesia, a country very rich in natural resources, poor?

My husband, our friends and I worked hard in the USSR. Fresh from college, full of enthusiasm, we were in our prime years.

Soviet communists had created a system according to teachings by Karl Marx. This system was based on the principles of equality: Rich exploiters (private business owners) didn’t have a place in this “workers’ paradise.” Therefore, entrepreneurs were outlawed.

There were many talented inventors in the Soviet Union. To register their invention and obtain a patent, they had to include names of official communist leaders as co-creators, putting their names above their own. If government leaders could not comprehend the idea or its relevance to the future, the invention died.

The same applied to works of art. In this “just society,” people were whipped into conformity. Smart or not smart, all were equally poor.

Government central planners in the USSR, or China, or Cuba, didn’t invent modern technology, and Soviet-made computers of the late 1970s were imitations of IBM’s, created from stolen blueprints.

And even in the United States, the Internet became valuable only once the private sector took over and commercialized it. But read the whole thing.

Plus this: “Did Barack Obama study any history? Hard to say, as his college records are sealed.” Ouch.