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<div title="2012-07-18T17:46:58">July 18, 2012</div>
<h3>It’s Mitt Romney Who Doesn’t Understand America</h3>
<div>Posted by <cite><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/alex_koppelman/search?contributorName=Alex%20Koppelman" title="search site for content by Alex Koppelman" rel="author" target="_blank">Alex Koppelman</a></cite></div>
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<p><img alt="romney-capitalism.jpg" src="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/romney-capitalism.jpg" height="352" width="465"></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/07/13/remarks-president-campaign-event-roanoke-virginia" target="_blank">a speech on Friday</a>: </p>
<blockquote><p>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. </p></blockquote>
<div><blockquote><p>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. </p></blockquote>
<p>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 <i>at all</i>,” not “you didn’t build that business in a vacuum.” And then they pounced on it. </p>
<p>“I think it can now be said without equivocation—without equivocation—this man hates this country,” Rush Limbaugh <a href="http://mediamatters.org/video/2012/07/16/limbaugh-it-can-now-be-said-without-equivocatio/187150" target="_blank">said</a>
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.” </p>
<p>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 <a href="http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/17/12791391-romney-surrogate-sununu-i-wish-this-president-would-learn-how-to-be-an-american" target="_blank">campaign conference call</a> on Tuesday: </p>
<blockquote><p>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. </p></blockquote>
<p>Later, <a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2012/07/sununu-apologizes-for-obama-remarks-129263.html" target="_blank">Sununu said</a>,
“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.”</p>
<p>And then, in a fiery speech yesterday, Romney himself <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvYCeXAcdG4" target="_blank">said</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>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.</p></blockquote>
<p>Romney followed up on this at a <a href="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" target="_blank">town hall on Wednesday</a>:
“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.”</p>
<p>But every one of the paragons of American capitalism that Romney
named in fact benefitted from government intervention and support, both
direct and indirect.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><small>ENIAC</small>, the first general-purpose electronic computer, was a project for the Army. <small>UNIVAC</small>, the first commercial computer in the U.S., was developed by <small>ENIAC</small>’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 <a href="http://www.ti.com/corp/docs/company/history/timeline/defense/1960/docs/61-first_ic.htm" target="_blank">own official history</a>, it never would have happened without the Air Force: </p>
<blockquote><p>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.” </p></blockquote>
<p>(All of this applies to Gates and Microsoft, too, of course.)</p>
<p> 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 <a href="http://www8.garmin.com/aboutGPS/" target="_blank">still runs</a> the Global Positioning System. </p>
<p>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 <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=iU4EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA61&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank">almost entirely</a>
to producing government propaganda during the Second World War—a war
that, incidentally, safeguarded America and American companies.)</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>As Eric Schlosser <a href="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" target="_blank">notes</a>
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:</p>
<blockquote><p> 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. </p></blockquote>
<p>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.) </p>
<p>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.’” </p>
<p>And it’s hard to believe that “Papa John”—real name John Schnatter; he came up with the idea for a pizza place <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/22/news/companies/papa_johns_pizza_schnatter.fortune/index.htm" target="_blank">while he was attending</a> Ball State University, a state school—could have succeeded as he has without the example set by Kroc and his contemporaries. </p>
<p>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, <a href="http://www.dot.state.il.us/il50/lincoln_highway.html" target="_blank">wrote</a>,
“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.”)</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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, <a href="http://www.salon.com/2009/03/06/pig_odor/" target="_blank">genuinely and obviously worthwhile</a>. Others may never pan out—but McCain certainly has no way of knowing whether they’ll fail or produce the next <small>ENIAC</small>.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p><i>Photograph of the <small>ENIAC</small> computer, from 1946, courtesy of Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.</i></p></div>
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