Business owner Ray Gaster of Savannah, Georgia made headlines recently with a highly visible response to President Obama’s recent remarks about how government helps make commerce possible. Obama had remarked, “Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

Gaster’s response: signs hung prominently outside his three storefronts declaring that he built the business without any help from the government.

Government No Help

It’s a valid and powerful message… that completely misses the point. I like this annotated version itemizing some aspects of his business that Gaster clearly didn’t build himself:

Government Help

Obama isn’t saying that everyone needs direct and explicit government help to start a business (e.g., with borrowed government funding), but rather that surrounding every business is a system of infrastructure, laws, and commerce that makes the endeavor possible.

The government built the roads carrying customers and merchandise, laid the wires that carry electricity and communications, established the police and fire departments that protect the building and its occupants from theft and disaster, and developed the civil justice system that provides recourse against fraud.

Critics of this image suggest the fallacy is that these things are all funded with taxpayer dollars, so it’s ultimately still the business owner paying for all of it. The trouble is that no one person’s tax dollars could fully fund all the services from street lights to sewer lines the government currently provides. Just hiring enough police officers to provide protection around the clock would use up every dollar I’ve paid in the past several years.

But private police forces are at least theoretically possible. (We could have a system where only people who have paid for police protection receive it.) Other government-run services are impossible to separate in that way. I could, for example, pay for the construction and maintenance of the roadway in front of my house, but that road is only valuable to me when it’s linked to other roads leading elsewhere in the city. If my neighbors don’t care about roads, how could I get across town?

Two years ago, Colorado Springs turned off its street lights, inviting residents who wanted the lamps relit to write a check to cover the cost of their lamp’s electricity. And while I’d be happy to pay for the electricity to the lamp outside my house, I like that when I go running in my neighborhood at night, every lamp is lit.

Ultimately the disconnect here is understanding the difference between what our government officials do and what government does. Maybe your roads are crumbling, your mayor is a crook, and your governor has been embezzling tax dollars for years — and there’s no excusing any of that. But their failures don’t eliminate the need to have a government of some kind. There are some things we just can’t do on our own: like building a business.

The Boy Scouts of America supposedly spent the past two years reevaluating whether to allow gay Scouts and volunteers to participate in their organization. They decided against it.

“The vast majority of the parents of youth we serve value their right to address issues of same-sex orientation within their family, with spiritual advisers, and at the appropriate time and in the right setting,” said Bob Mazzuca, chief scout executive of Boy Scouts of America.

This logic is baffling mostly because it necessarily implies that gay people cannot be in a room with children without talking about sex. Granting unequivocally that parents want to discuss sex and adult relationships privately with their own children at home, shouldn’t these protesters also be worried about the conversations your straight leaders are having?

Perhaps more importantly, though, this rationale assumes that absent direct contact with an actual, “real life” gay person, children will never hear about homosexuality outside their home. My daughter wasn’t in Kindergarten more than three months before she came home asking if two boys could ever get married. That’s what Kindergartners do!

In Kindergarten Cop, on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s first day in a Kindergarten classroom, a boy stands up and proudly proclaims, “Boys have a penis; girls have a vagina,” to giggles from the rest of the class. In my daughter’s actual classroom I heard similar assertions about death, politics, mathematics, religion, spelling, clothing, pets, and family relationships. And apparently, one day, someone took ten seconds at recess to announce that sometimes two boys will marry each other.

Sometimes sheltering children from the complexities of reality is useful and warranted, but attempting to shelter children from the diversity of other people they’ll inevitably encounter in adulthood is both futile and harmful. However much good the Boy Scouts might do (and they do some considerable good), our society cannot tolerate any group that teaches children to discriminate and to exclude.

Not coincidentally, while the Boy Scouts spent the last two years deciding gay people are worthy of their group, I’ve spent the last two years refusing to participate in their organization in any way. Let’s watch the Boy Scouts decline into obsolescence as more tolerant groups rise to take their place. Perhaps the more tolerant Baden-Powell Service Association is our first step?