I KEEP HEARING THOSE ON THE RIGHT SAY the biggest obstacle on the road to prosperity is a lack of confidence on the part of business owners — that the only thing preventing so-called “job creators” from hiring all those unemployed workers out there is the grim prospect of government action — that is, anything along the lines of progressive action. This, the weak-kneed, timorous wrecks say, would crush their spirits and force them to sit on their piles of cash until … well, until a Republican gets elected.

Let me be blunt: For anyone who has spent any time around actual business executives and entrepreneurs, this is laughable, self-serving nonsense.

I have a friend who has spent time in the offices of venture capital firms on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley looking for funding, and those offices are filled with people willing to throw hundreds of millions of dollars at a credible person with an interesting idea.

American businesses are not helmed by fearful people. That said, I think it is worth asking: Why is America a rich country? The answer — or rather, the mix of contributing factors — is fairly straightforward.

• We have a long tradition of the rule of law. You can’t just have your business rivals run out of business because you happen to be some official’s brother in law. If you invent a better light bulb, you can patent that invention and reap the rewards of your hard work without fear of some competitor copying your design and cutting into your profits.

• We are a magnet for the educated and the entrepreneurial from across the globe. The tech company I work for was started by two immigrants who had Ph.D.s and great ideas. The American corporate landscape is the dynamic place it is due in no small part to immigrants with good ideas who upended the established order and took risks to make their vision a reality. I’m thinking not just of Silicon Valley, but also Hollywood (the American movie business was virtually invented by immigrants), Manhattan (the Polish, Jewish, Irish and others were key players in the establishment of that island as the de facto Capital of Capital), and countless other places.

• We have astonishingly productive farmland. The humorist P.J. O’Rourke once joked that if you plant a foot in Iowa, you’ll grow more toes. Since the Midwest began to be intensively farmed in the 19th century, there has never been a year of famine because of crop failure in the United States. More than that, there is an enormous surplus of food, fiber and other agricultural goods every single year in the U.S. Much of the rest of the world eats because of American farmers.

• We have the world’s finest higher education system. Walk the campuses of the University of California-Berkeley, Stanford, Princeton, Harvard, Yale, M.I.T., and so on, and notice that you hear people speaking languages from every corner of the globe. Many of those students start companies here in the States, or get jobs here doing cutting-edge projects that their education prepared them for. Not just that: those universities themselves are responsible for an enormous amount of the basic research that serves as the foundation for an awful lot of what we think of as advanced civilization.

• We have a government that pays for huge amounts of basic and applied research. For all the talk from the right about how governments can do no good, it is worth mentioning that an awful lot of what we think of as modern technology came about as a direct result of government initiatives. Jet air travel, digital computers, the Internet, the GPS navigation system, synthetic oil and rubber, communication satellites, a large proportion of experimental physics and human space travel, to name a few, all were either begun or hugely accelerated by the government.

• We have an enormous amount of natural resources. Not just the previously mentioned farmland, but the U.S. was once, and will soon be again, the largest producer of oil in the world. We also have the largest coal reserves on Earth, we’re near the top in recoverable iron ore and other metal ores, our forests contain vast amounts of timber and our coastal fisheries are among the richest on the planet.

• We have a single, highly integrated and politically stable market of 300 million people. America has been, and will continue to be, a great place for business owners to make Himalaya-scale mountains of money — no matter whether taxes and regulation are high, as they were in the boom years of the 1950s and ’60s, or low as they are now.

The biggest constraint on the American economy at the moment isn’t businessmen afraid of regulation or taxes. The biggest constraint is a lack of final demand. Businesses love customers more than they hate regulations and taxes, and there is not enough purchasing power in the hands of American workers to generate strong demand.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand. He works for a tech start-up in San Francisco.

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