"Peter" has some thoughts on Obama's war on business.
Barack Obama's Declaration of War Against the Way America was Founded and Built - The Rush Limbaugh Show
If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.
if you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own.
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 -- 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.
Bob Beckel on "The Five" doubled down on this nonsense by citing (mis)quotes from Steve Jobs , Bill Gates and Henry Ford, in which they were supposed to have said that the iPhone would not have been possible without the Space Program that gave us computer chips, that there would not be a market for personal computers without the government's internet, and that car makers sold more cars because government built roads.
Of course. Bob Beckel's job on The Five is to demonstrate how stupid liberals are, and he is really great at it!
The "government" did not invent the technology for making computer chips. It was scientists and engineers who did that, most of them formally associated with Bell Labs, a private research facility run by AT&T. It was entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley who figured out and are continuing to figure out how to turn the original invention into dirt cheap yet invaluable mass product.
The internet originated as the ARPANET, a network capable of surviving an all-out nuclear attack, intended to maintain the links between Defense Department agencies, contractors and university labs; again, the "government" did not "invent" the internet, it only coordinated the efforts of private companies to build it. Today's world wide web was not invented by "the government," it was an add-on, using technology invented in private industry and the only contribution by "the government" was granting permission for the private participants, who provided their own hardware to build the system, to open it to the whole world without restrictions. The packet switching of the ARPANET was based on designs by Lawrence Roberts of the Lincoln Laboratory, NOT the government. The "government" did not do anything but COORDINATE the efforts of private companies, mostly in the aerospace industry, and research labs in our colleges and universities, to run the space program. The insight of the decade was that the genius that NASA contributed was NOT in science and engineering, it was in MANAGEMENT, linking together a huge number of very diverse type of entities into one smoothly functioning operation.
And Henry Ford's cars came LONG before there were any paved roads between cities; the explosive popularity of cars pointed to the need for roads and bridges. There are videos of car enthusiast pioneers driving cross country, getting stuck in mud and snow, waiting for weeks at a time for spare parts to arrive by barge and train so they can continue their foolish quest. And in all cases the investment in the projects, including the taxes that the government spent on them, came from the private free market economy which first had to generate the profits and reserves they needed to get going. (No, I was not there at the time),
But in contemplating this strange debate sparked by our infernally evil community organizer in chief, I can't help but notice a downright laughably ironic parallel between the communist argument against entrepreneurs, and the creationist argument against evolution. Now, now, don't be offended, just bear with me for a moment. I don't like it much either, but it is funny, considering that the communists are rabid evolutionists. And yet...
In making this now famous confession of his communist faith, Obama looks at the world, sees its complexity and interconnectedness, and thinks it's always been this way, that somebody - "others," "we," the "government," anybody but an army of famous and anonymous entrepreneurs - set out to design and build it that way. A producer today obviously relies on existing streets and roads to get his goods to market; and Obama wonders, who built the roads? The producer today obviously relies on the internet to drum up business; and Obama wonders, who built the internet? The producer's office, factory and home obviously need water, gas, electricity, etc.; and Obama asks, who built all that? Obama's answer is, "government." He and his ilk assert that it was "government" who provided the ideas, the grand design, the technologies, the engineering, the manpower and the funds to build all the infrastructure on which modern life depends. Obama does not consider how we got here, he even overlooks his dearly held ideas about evolution even though example after example stares him in the face and demonstrates how evolution works, even in the realm of economics.
It was Henry Ford's mass produced cars that spurred people to build roads, and it was the car's popularity and ubiquity that made people decide that roads must be open to all and therefore be funded by taxes. First came cars, then the roads. The interstate highway system did not come first, but last. Many of us still alive today can remember when there were no freeways. No grand urban or interurban design decreed that there shall be cars and trucks and interstate concrete strips to carry them, before there were any cars and trucks and paved roads, before anybody else even understood the concept of cars and trucks and roads. The closest we come to anything like it came a hundred years before, when the federal government issued land grants to railroads to open up the west, to help settle it, to establish new towns, to link the continent from coast to coast. On the other hand, the government did not build roads, not a single one, in the Oklahoma territory before they staged the famous land rush so the Sooners could get to it...sooner.
The same process of invention, private investment, embryonic start, then growth, evolution and maturation characterizes every new technology that typifies modern life; the change from muddy trails to railroads, from wash tubs to washers and dryers, from ice boxes to refrigerators; from kerosene lamps to electric lights; from incandescent bulbs to neon tubes to LEDs; from coal to oil to gas and nuclear fuel for power plants; from horse drawn wagons to diesel powered trucks; from horse-drawn to electric powered street cars in our cities; from vacuum tubes to semiconductor chips; from slide rules to computers; from radio to television; from stage shows to movies and television; from smoke signals and couriers to telegraph wires and cell phones; from medieval bloodletting to antibiotics, diagnostic imaging, non-invasive surgery, ad infinitum. In no case did government offer anything but initial resistance and luddite obstruction, then stifling new taxes and regulation when faced with inevitable progress.
After all, you can't trust those evil, profit-motivated entrepreneurs!
