Mr. ‘Spread-the-Wealth’ “You-didn’t-build-that” Obama is having another bad week after reading a bit too much off the left side of the TelePrompTer. His Divine Luminance seems to have forgotten what country he is trying to lord over.
When he tried to tell actual business owners that their success can only be the result of the work of many (with the sanction of the state and its many gifts to all mankind), he reminded everyone who has ever worked to make something out of nothing that Mr. Obama has no frame of reference; he has never made anything…but a speech. (And he doesn’t even make those; he just delivers them.)
Oh, And by the way…someone tell the socialists who write his speeches and load up his prompter that the government did not create the internet.
It’s an urban legend that the government launched the Internet. The myth is that the Pentagon created the Internet to keep its communications lines up even in a nuclear strike. The truth is a more interesting story about how innovation happens—and about how hard it is to build successful technology companies even once the government gets out of the way.
If the government didn’t invent the Internet, who did? Vinton Cerf developed the TCP/IP protocol, the Internet’s backbone, and Tim Berners-Lee gets credit for hyperlinks.
But full credit goes to the company where Mr. Taylor worked after leaving ARPA: Xerox. It was at the Xerox PARC labs in Silicon Valley in the 1970s that the Ethernet was developed to link different computer networks. Researchers there also developed the first personal computer (the Xerox Alto) and the graphical user interface that still drives computer usage today.
According to a book about Xerox PARC, “Dealers of Lightning” (by Michael Hiltzik), its top researchers realized they couldn’t wait for the government to connect different networks, so would have to do it themselves.
The inconvenient truth is that government involvement there had a negative effect on the development and expansion of Internet technology.
“The Internet, in fact, reaffirms the basic free market critique of large government. Here for 30 years the government had an immensely useful protocol for transferring information, TCP/IP, but it languished. . . . In less than a decade, private concerns have taken that protocol and created one of the most important technological revolutions of the millennia.”
So, Mr. Obama. Your precious government? It didn’t build that either.
H/T
Daniel J. Mitchell/ TownHall.com – Crovitz: Wall Street Journal
