Former President Barack Obama once infamously said, “You didn’t build that.” I beg to differ. Our forebears created it, inherited it, and improved it for generations.
Businesses created jobs in their self-interest. Municipal revenue from taxes on land improvements paid for the infrastructure that serves them. The person who had nothing to do with building it was your father. Your father and his progenitors did not build this. Neither did the innocent Dreamers, culturally bankrupt Somali fraudsters, and other freeloaders and criminal immigrants who have leveraged on our legendary charity. This is citizen property. Historically, we have been generous in letting self-interested workers, builders, and inventors come enjoy it, become citizens, and create their own American dream.
The land, the roads, the power grids, the communications systems, the legal order, and the accumulated knowledge that make modern American life possible did not appear by accident or by the will of any single administration. Generations of citizens surveyed the continent, cleared it, farmed it, mined it, wired it, and defended it. They paid taxes at the local level on the value they added to land and improvements. Those taxes built the streets, water systems, schools, and the basic services that make commerce possible. Businesses did not wait for permission from distant politicians. They organized capital, hired labor, and produced goods because it served their own interest. In doing so, they generated the municipal revenue that maintained the physical plant every citizen uses.
Citizen property carries obligations as well as rights. No able-bodied person should ride the American bus for free. The bar for contribution should remain high and should be reassessed regularly. New technology continually expands what people with limited mobility can accomplish. Many people with special needs perform well in entry-level work. The elderly who built and paid into the system deserve a stipend in old age. Those exceptions do not erase the basic rule: able-bodied adults contribute or they do not share fully in the inheritance.
When we treat the country as citizen property rather than as a free resource open to the world, several practical conclusions follow. First, access to the benefits of that property should require demonstrated effort and reciprocal obligation. Second, the federal government remains a servant charged with preserving and expanding the public goods that belong to the citizens, not a leader entitled to redistribute those goods according to its own preferences. Third, taxation should reflect the value of the infrastructure and legal order we inherited and continue to improve. Taxing end users, businesses, and financial institutions that rely on that infrastructure, and charging foreign parties for the benefits they extract from U.S. patents, security, and communications architecture, would remind every participant that abundance is not spontaneous. It is an inheritance held in stewardship.
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The alternative is the posture Obama expressed: that the individual or the business is merely a temporary occupant of something the state somehow produced. That view severs the connection between effort and ownership. It turns citizens into clients and the government into the source of all value. History shows the opposite. The value was created by successive generations of citizens who improved what they received and passed it forward.
The government’s proper role is to protect that chain of inheritance, not to claim credit for it or to dilute it by treating the country’s productive base as a domestic and international piggybank. We remain a generous people. We have always welcomed those willing to work, invent, and join the project as full citizens. Generosity does not require self-erasure. The property belongs to the citizens who built it, maintained it, and continue to improve it. Any policy that forgets that fact weakens both the property and the character of the people who hold it.
Michael Breeden is a retired Air Force chief master sergeant with 29 years of service as a combat controller in special operations. He writes on sovereignty, culture, and institutional accountability.