[Vision2020] It’s Mitt Romney Who Doesn’t Understand America

[Art Deco]

 July 18, 2012
It’s Mitt Romney Who Doesn’t Understand America
Posted by Alex Koppelman<http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/alex_koppelman/search?contributorName=Alex%20Koppelman>

[image: romney-capitalism.jpg]

The politically correct way to think about American inventors, innovators,
and entrepreneurs, it seems, is to imagine them as divorced entirely from
the rest of us: they rise up from the loamy soil of capitalism already
fully formed, Model T or iPod in hand.

That, at least, is the impression that’s been given by some
Republicans—including Mitt Romney—in the past couple days, since President
Obama got himself in trouble by saying this at a speech on
Friday<http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/07/13/remarks-president-campaign-event-roanoke-virginia>:


Look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You
didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, “Well,
it must be because I was just so smart.” There are a lot of smart people
out there. “It must be because I worked harder than everybody else.” Let me
tell you something—there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There
was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this
unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive.
Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t
build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get
invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all
the companies could make money off the Internet.

Led by Fox News, conservatives focussed on one line from those remarks—“If
you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that”—and have twisted it, made it
sound like he meant “you didn’t build that business *at all*,” not “you
didn’t build that business in a vacuum.” And then they pounced on it.

“I think it can now be said without equivocation—without equivocation—this
man hates this country,” Rush Limbaugh
said<http://mediamatters.org/video/2012/07/16/limbaugh-it-can-now-be-said-without-equivocatio/187150>when
he discussed Obama’s remarks during his show on Monday. “He is trying,
Barack Obama is trying to dismantle, brick by brick, the American dream.”

John Sununu, the former Governor of New Hampshire who also served as White
House Chief of Staff under President George H. W. Bush, sounded a similar
note in a campaign conference
call<http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/17/12791391-romney-surrogate-sununu-i-wish-this-president-would-learn-how-to-be-an-american>on
Tuesday:

The president clearly demonstrated that he has absolutely no idea how the
American economy functions. The men and women all over America who have
worked hard to build these businesses, their businesses, from the ground up
is how our economy became the envy of the world—it is the American way. And
I wish this President would learn how to be an American.

Later, Sununu said<http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2012/07/sununu-apologizes-for-obama-remarks-129263.html>,
“I shouldn’t have used those words, and I apologize for using those words.
But I don’t apologize for the idea that this president has demonstrated
that he does not understand how jobs are created in America.”

And then, in a fiery speech yesterday, Romney himself
said<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvYCeXAcdG4>
:

To say that Steve Jobs didn’t build Apple, that Henry Ford didn’t build
Ford Motor, that Papa John didn’t build Papa John pizza, that Ray Kroc
didn’t build McDonald’s, that Bill Gates didn’t build Microsoft … to say
something like that is not just foolishness, it’s insulting to every
entrepreneur, every innovator in America, and it’s wrong.

Romney followed up on this at a town hall on
Wednesday<http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/18/12815514-does-obama-think-steve-jobs-didnt-build-apple?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter>:
“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.

Take Jobs: he may have started Apple in his parents’ garage, but first he
attended a public high school, where he met the person who introduced him
to eventual Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. And even if they never took a
dime of government funding to do so, the computers they built together owed
a great deal to—and indeed, might never have been possible
without—government research, government scientists, and government money.

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<http://www.ti.com/corp/docs/company/history/timeline/defense/1960/docs/61-first_ic.htm>,
it never would have happened without the Air Force:

In 1959, the integrated circuit was little more than a laboratory creation.
Without contracts, TI would not have the funding needed to develop and
expand the program… [and] for TI to research manufacturing processes.
Willis Adcock, whose research and development lab produced the first
integrated circuits, pointed out, “I think we would have dropped the
program had it not been for the Air Force’s support.”

(All of this applies to Gates and Microsoft, too, of course.)

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 <http://www8.garmin.com/aboutGPS/> the
Global Positioning System.

Much of the pioneering work on computers—including breakthroughs in
graphics and interaction—was done at M.I.T., a land-grant university. Some
of the markets for Apple here in the U.S. were originally opened up by the
New Deal-era rural electrification project. Government funds helped schools
buy its products. The list goes on. (And by the way: Jobs’s side project
Pixar survived through lean years because of its contract with Disney,
which only made it through its own hard times by devoting itself almost
entirely<http://books.google.com/books?id=iU4EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA61&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false>to
producing government propaganda during the Second World War—a war
that,
incidentally, safeguarded America and American companies.)

Then there’s Ray Kroc. The government didn’t invent the milk-shake machines
that he was selling when he discovered the original McDonald’s. But there’s
a strong case to be made that the fast-food industry is in essence a fluke
of history, the result of a peculiar set of circumstances created by
government intervention.

As Eric Schlosser
notes<http://books.google.com/books?id=yNFN1OpnkBkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=fast+food+nation&source=bl&ots=l0heuy9t40&sig=vgf0Knh53qZwDJAVCVMAnFI4OHg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=OPoGUJnzGqbX0QGxwrjqCA&ved=0CD8Q6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=los%20angeles&f=false>in
“Fast Food Nation,” Southern California—the cradle of fast food—was
booming in the post-war years, when the McDonald brothers created their
“Speedee Service System,” because of government spending:

Between 1940 and 1945, the federal government spent nearly $20 billion in
California, mainly in and around Los Angeles … During those six years,
federal spending was responsible for nearly half of the personal income in
southern California…. While Hollywood garnered most of the headlines,
defense spending remained the focus of the local economy for the next two
decades, providing about one-third of its jobs.

The roads that made this new style of service and food so appealing were,
of course, government roads. And—for better or worse—it’s well-documented
that government subsidies are the reason that the raw ingredients for
McDonald’s food are so cheap; food-safety regulations are the reason they
are trustworthy. (Again, there are a number of indirect ways in which
government played a role—besides directly subsidizing farmers, it also
funded those land-grant colleges and universities, some of which then
played important parts in agricultural innovations, and grew larger and
stronger with students attending on the G.I. Bill, and so on.)

Today, McDonald’s is still a beneficiary of the government’s work and
largesse. Schlosser writes: “In the 1980s, the chain become [sic] one of
the world’s leading purchasers of commercial satellite photography, using
it to predict sprawl from outer space…. As one marketing publication
observed, the software developed by McDonald’s permits businessmen to ‘spy
on their customers with the same equipment once used to fight the cold
war.’”

And it’s hard to believe that “Papa John”—real name John Schnatter; he came
up with the idea for a pizza place while he was
attending<http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/22/news/companies/papa_johns_pizza_schnatter.fortune/index.htm>Ball
State University, a state school—could have succeeded as he has
without the example set by Kroc and his contemporaries.

Finally, there’s Henry Ford. Obama’s critics would argue that the boom in
government road building around the turn of the twentieth century—before
that, according to one historian, “If all the hard-surfaced roads in the
nation had been laid end to end… they would not have stretched from New
York to Boston”—was a result of Ford’s success, and not a cause of it. And
they’d be largely right. But this doesn’t have to be a one-way
relationship. The money that the government spent on building roads was
capital that Ford and other automakers could use elsewhere. The expansion
of roads to rural areas created new markets. The growth of suburbs, enabled
by those government roads, created further demand. (Ford was, for the
record, strongly for the government building roads and against private
interests doing it. One of Ford’s employees, responding on his behalf to a
request that he give money to build a privately funded highway,
wrote<http://www.dot.state.il.us/il50/lincoln_highway.html>,
“Frankly the writer is not very favorably disposed to the plan, because as
long as private interests are willing to build good roads for the general
public, the general public will not be very interested in building good
roads for itself. I believe in spending money to educate the public to the
necessity of building good roads, and let everybody contribute their share
in proper taxes.”)

None of this diminishes the accomplishments of these men: without Steve
Jobs, there’s no iPhone, no matter how much the government spends. But the
myth that Romney and his allies are pushing, that American capitalists and
innovators have flourished entirely on their own, is just that. And it’s an
idea that may ultimately prove damaging to the U.S.

This isn’t limited to Presidential politics. The role that the government
once played in innovation, in developing some of the technology that has
made America the power that it is today, has been pared back sharply in
recent decades, and it’s still constantly under threat. John McCain makes a
regular practice of finding the most ridiculous-sounding government grants,
stripping them of all context, and mocking them. It’s good for a laugh, and
it’s solid politics, but it’s a terrible way to make policy. Some of the
projects he makes fun of are, on their own, genuinely and obviously
worthwhile <http://www.salon.com/2009/03/06/pig_odor/>. Others may never
pan out—but McCain certainly has no way of knowing whether they’ll fail or
produce the next ENIAC.

If this country is to continue leading the world both economically and
technologically, then someone has to be willing to spend money on silly
risks. Someone has to fund a production line for the integrated circuit
computers that T.I. can’t see a use for. Someone has to send rockets into
space for no other reason than because we can, and because we should see
what happens after that. It’s the American way.

*Photograph of the ENIAC computer, from 1946, courtesy of Time & Life
Pictures/Getty Images.*

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Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
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