President Barack Obama’s recent business-related comments in Virginia (“If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that; somebody else made that happen”) sounded more communistic than capitalistic, especially because the “somebody” to whom Obama referred was in fact the U.S. government.

Progressives and the mainstream media were quick to come to the aid of the president by stating that similar statements have been said by other entrepreneurial moguls, such as Henry Ford, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Andrew Carnegie and Walter Chrysler. Others excused Obama by saying he “borrowed” his business verbiage from Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren.

No one is denying the genius of collective contributions or the power of working together. One of my favorite acronyms is TEAM, which stands for “together everyone achieves more.” But the key difference between Obama’s reference to teamwork and all the rest of those inspirational innovators’ references to teamwork is that the latter ones were regarding other individuals’ collaborative efforts within their own entrepreneurialism, whereas Obama’s was pointing to politicians — specifically the federal government — as the business associates responsible for your success.