You Don't "Build" a Company, Anyway

(Apologies for how late this post is relative to the original controversy. I'm pretty sure that this is a post I had meant to write some evening a few weeks ago, but never got around to it, and then only remembered what I had meant to write a few minutes ago.)

The conservative take on Barack Obama's "you didn't build that" line, which was of course in reality a slightly awkward of phrasing the general liberal idea that every successful business enterprise can only succeed because of a general environment of well-maintained infrastructure, a stable legal regime protecting property rights etc. that's created by the government, is that he instead alleged that small business owners did not genuinely deserve credit for the success of their businesses. This was always a stretch, for a lot of reasons one of which is that it's clearly not what Obama was saying. Moreover, many of the businesspeople that the Romney campaign has trotted out with big "WE DID BUILD IT" banners have demonstrably taken lots of government support for their businesses, which is nice and embarrassing.

But the way you know that the whole thing is nonsense, even without bothering to go back and look at the full text of Obama's speech and see that, yep, obviously the antecedent for "that" was roads and bridges and stuff, is by reading those banners. They sound ridiculous. Seriously, read that banner again. "We did build it"? "You did built that"? It just sounds absurd, on a purely linguistic level. Part of the problem is the use of the dangling pronoun, which only serves to highlight the fact that the entire Republican interpretation hinges on a flagrantly wrong reading of the original pronoun. Another part of the problem, I think, is the use of the word "build." Obama, of course, was using the word "build" in a purely literal sense. He was talking about roads and bridges, things which are built, as in constructed, and he was making the accurate observation that very few small business owners are responsible in any meaningful way (except tax dollars!) for the construction of the general infrastructure.

Now, people do use all sorts of wacky words to describe expansion and growth using transitive verbs in the economic context, most famously with the concept of "growing" the economy. I guess you might hear a person saying something like, "I built this business from the ground up," in which case they're very explicitly invoking a metaphor of physical construction. But to use the word as Romney is using it just strikes me as unnatural. You wouldn't say, "he built that business," again unless you added a modifier like "from the ground up" or "with his bare hands" to create a more specific metaphorical image. You might say "he created that business" or "he grew that business" or something. But the specific use of "build" in "we did build it" just sounds awkward and weird. And that's the very first thing about this whole bloody nonsense that should've tipped you off that it was nonsense.