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:
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 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 on Tuesday:
Later, Sununu said, “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:
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.
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, it never would have happened without the Air Force:
(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 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 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 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:
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 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, “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. 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.