It has been a basic tenet of socialism for many years. Now President Obama has placed the concept front and center in his re-election campaign: The rich didn’t get there on their own.

Here’s how the argument goes. Obama says businesses become successful because somebody paid for the roads and bridges. Like rich people don’t pay the gas tax too? He says rich people become successful because somewhere down the line there was a great teacher. And everyone else doesn’t have access to the same teachers? He says rich people got rich because of all the people who work for them instead of acknowledging that without job creators there would be no jobs.

He says the rich aren’t smarter than everybody else. He says they don’t work harder than everybody else. There are a lot of hard-working people, he says. By that logic, the guy digging the ditch should be making more than the CEO of Apple. That’s not the way it works.

He says it’s this great country of ours that allows people to be successful and on that point he’s correct. But it’s because of the freedom we enjoy without government intervention, relative to most of the rest of the world, not because government is helping businesses succeed.

One key line from his stump speech in Roanoke, Va., sums up Obama’s philosophy. “If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that,” he said. What the president means without coming right out and saying it is the wealthy don’t deserve to be wealthy. They need to redistribute their wealth among the workers in their businesses. This is straight out of the talking points of the Workers World Party, an organization that has historically supported the Mao regime in China, Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Kim Jong-Il in North Korea.

But let’s examine Mr. Obama’s argument for a moment. Forget that it’s the entrepreneurs and risk-takers that make this country the envy of the world, what if we applied this same philosophy to Obama? John McCain worked just as hard as he did in 2008. Shouldn’t Obama have offered him a co-presidency?

Obama went to Harvard, although we’ve yet to see his transcripts. I’m sure there were plenty of folks there who worked just as hard as he did. Did he offer to shave off a point or two from his GPA and give it to them? And how about all the folks who couldn’t get into Harvard? Is that fair? Can you imagine an Olympics where everyone who works hard gets a gold medal? I’m sure everyone competing this summer is working hard. Why is it fair that most will go home empty-handed?

This country was made great by competition. Some of us strive to be the very best. Others of us strive to live off the hard work and ingenuity of others. It’s easy to revile a business owner who drives a nice car and lives in a nice house. It’s much harder to get off your rump and risk everything starting a business like he or she did.

If Mitt Romney wants to win this election, he needs to quickly position himself as that American success story instead of running from it. The battle lines have been drawn by the President. Success is the enemy.

There was a time in this country when we celebrated success, when we marveled at innovation, and were awestruck by what successful people had accomplished. Please tell me that the days of celebrating excellence are not over.

The day Obama succeeds in vilifying success is the day this country stops being successful.