Just as Romney advances a simplistic model that ignores environmental factors in national success (for example, native access to natural resources), the Republican Party's response to Barack Obama's sensible observation that our individual success is partially a function of a properly functioning government is to deny that success is due to anything besides personal heroics.
In both cases, the Republican worldview has equated success and virtue explicitly with financial gain, which has corroded our public discourse and provided the scaffolding for our current economic miseries.