It’s Mitt Romney Who Doesn’t Understand America
July 18, 2012
Posted by Alex Koppelman
... Romney followed up on this at a town hall on Wednesday: “To say what he said is to say that Steve Jobs didn’t build Apple Computer or that Bill Gates didn’t build Microsoft or that Henry Ford didn’t build Ford Motor Company … This is the height of foolishness. It shows how out of touch he is with the character of America.”
But every one of the paragons of American capitalism that Romney named in fact benefitted from government intervention and support, both direct and indirect ...
ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer, was a project for the Army. UNIVAC, the first commercial computer in the U.S., was developed by ENIAC’s inventors, and the first model sold went to the Census Bureau. The first computer to use integrated circuits was developed by Texas Instruments—and according to T.I.’s own official history, it never would have happened without the Air Force ...
The iPod was a great invention, but the real money in the iPod and its successors isn’t the technology itself, but the various media that Apple sells to fill those devices. It distributes all of that media, of course, through the Internet, which, as Obama noted—and all Al Gore jokes aside—started life as a government project. You can ask Siri to tell you the location of the nearest bookstore selling “Atlas Shrugged” because of Jobs and his employees, but she’s able to give you an answer because the government developed and still runs the Global Positioning System ...
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/07/romney-obama-inventions-and-government-money.html
