Give proper credit where it’s due

Jim Bacon, North Las Vegas

Tuesday, July 24, 2012 | 2:01 a.m.

“You didn’t build that.”

There has been a lot of discussion about that recent remark by President Barack Obama, virtually all of it heavily partisan.

The real position should be somewhere in the middle. Yes, all of us (in business or not) depend upon those who have gone before us in some way. At the same time, when it comes to infrastructure, it doesn’t serve much purpose if nobody puts it to use. That also applies to the education one gets.

The person who has an idea and the drive to implement it and bring it to market deserves just as much credit as the people who supplied the tools that were used in the process. It would be ridiculous to say the person who manufactured a hammer is more important than the carpenter who used the hammer to build a house.

People who create something new or do something new with existing tools rightly deserve credit for what they do.

Every Nobel Prize winner in the sciences will say that they stand on the shoulders of those who came before them. Yet I doubt any of them will say they don’t deserve the award because of that. They did something new with existing tools, or in some cases, created a new tool.

To sum up, give credit where it is due, not too much, not too little.