Monday, July 30, 2012  A customer is not providing a subsidy  In
today's paper, Dan Bice reports that Obama critic Ken
Dragotta has obtained government contracts. I suppose that
some will believe that this is ironic or revealing. Sorry. I
can't see it.   Here's the story. Dragotta has been publicly
critical of President Obama's now infamous "you didn't build
that" speech. Dragotta seems to believe that he and his
colleagues - and not the federal government - built his
business, Systems Engineering and Automation Corporation. But,
it turns out, that Dragotta's company has gotten contracts to
provide machine parts for the Department of Defense. Hasn't he
benefited from government largess? Isn't he a hypocrite? No, he
hasn't. No, he isn't. At least not because he got some
government contracts.  The import of the President's remarks -
no matter how you read them - is that people benefit from
government and that this somehow obligates them to the state and
gives it a form of "claim" on their success.  On one level