It's Mitt Romney Who Doesn't Understand America - New Yorker (blog)

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 Republicansâ€"including Mitt Romneyâ€"in the past couple days, since President Obama got himself in trouble by saying this at a speech on Friday:

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 businessâ€"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 remarksâ€"“If you’ve got a businessâ€"you didn’t build that”â€"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 equivocationâ€"without equivocationâ€"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:

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 worldâ€"it is the American way. And I wish this President would learn how to be an American.

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:

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: “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 toâ€"and indeed, might never have been possible withoutâ€"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 Instrumentsâ€"and according to T.I.’s own official history, 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 notedâ€"and all Al Gore jokes asideâ€"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 computersâ€"including breakthroughs in graphics and interactionâ€"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 Warâ€"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 Californiaâ€"the cradle of fast foodâ€"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. Andâ€"for better or worseâ€"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 roleâ€"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”â€"real name John Schnatter; he came up with the idea for a pizza place while he was attending Ball State University, a state schoolâ€"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 centuryâ€"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”â€"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 outâ€"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.