President Barack Obama famously uttered the words that may come to define him and the 2012 presidential campaign: "If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen."

The truth is the opposite: It is government that is utterly dependent on the private sector, in fact on a small highly-productive subset of the private sector, for its ability to do anything.

Obama says entrepreneurs should be fawningly grateful to government (and implicitly to him) for teachers, roads, bridges, and the Internet. But who paid for that teacher, that infrastructure, and that scientific research?

The answer is not "taxpayers" and certainly not "all of us" but rather "a very small percentage of Americans."