In the now infamous speech, President Obama gave about business and government, he claimed that , “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” His point was that just because you started a business, you didn’t do it alone. There were teachers that helped you learn, roads to help you transport your goods, and no doubt, he would say, bureaucrats in Washington taking money to pay for those teachers and roads. If you are a businessman, great job creating your business, but give credit where credit is due: government!

Well, what if we took that same philosophy and applied it to government. Mr. Obama says that it’s government that laid the foundation for all these great things like roads and bridges and the Internet, but the government didn’t just do all those things on ITS own either. In fact, a government can’t do anything on its own since it relies on the blood, sweat, and tears of its subjects in order to do anything. Government, in its most basic form, is coersion. It is the authority to force people to do what they don’t want to do—a monopoly of violence. With regard to all these positive externalities that the president talks about, the government requires funding from people who pay involuntarily. The government couldn’t pay for teachers without stealing money through taxation of private enterprise first. The government could build roads and bridges without first taking the land and paying for them with money forcefully taken from law abiding citizens. The Internet didn’t just happen on its own, rather the Defense Department spent a lot of hours and taxpayer money inefficiently to come up with it.

So, using the president’s (and Elizabeth Warren’s) sophomoric philosophy on government itself, it’s clear that sure, government does end up doing some good with the money it steals, but it can’t do anything without private enterprise in the first place. Private enterprise without government may not be the same, but government without private enterprise is nonexistent.

Let’s say you’re working your job and you’re hungry for a pizza. The government steals $50 from you and makes you a sandwich instead. That sandwich is great and you will definitely eat it, but to say that we should credit government for your production after you eat the sandwich is absurd. They took the money required to make the sandwich from you, they spent it inefficiently, and they gave you something you didn’t want in the first place! Bravo government, bravo.

At the very least, we should apply the same standard to government that these amateur philosophers apply to the business sector. If businesspeople didn’t build that, government sure as hell didn’t either.