President Obama‘s speech alleging that business owners didn’t build their own businesses, and aren’t responsible for their own success, has become a lightning rod among his opponents, and an awkward subject among his supporters. So polarizing is the speech that it has attracted enough refutations to fill a full-length book, just on the subject of that one speech.

However, most of those refutations have focused on the idea that businesspeople aren’t responsible for their own success. This isn’t surprising, as that premise is the most blatantly ridiculous part of the argument. However, practically no one has asked whether the President’s argument adds up, even if you accept the idea that businesses aren’t responsible for their own success, which has given the Left cover as long as they can cower behind that self-evidently absurd premise.

Until now. One writer at Pajamas Media, calling himself “zombie” (in spite of evidently having a fully functional brain), has written an epic takedown of the President’s speech, dissecting every single piece of the argument with a scalpel and showing that it simply does not add up, no matter how much you torture the logic. Highlights of zombie’s takedown follow:

When Obama implied at the Roanoke, Virginia rally that some businessmen refuse to pay for public works from which they benefit, he presented a thesis which, like a three-legged stool, relies on three assumptions that must allbe true for the argument to remain standing:

1. That the public programs he mentioned in his speech constitute a significant portion of the federal budget;
2. That business owners don’t already pay far more than their fair share of these expenses; and
3. That these specific public benefits are a federal issue, rather than a local issue.

 

If any of these legs fails, then the whole argument collapses.

For good measure, we won’t just kick out one, we’ll kick out all three.[...]