The comments have it covered:
Commonsense99
This is a very ignorant commentary. As someone deeply involved in business and the public sector in Cupertino, I can say that the success of businesses in this community are fully a collaboration between private sector and public sector operations. To label something "private" as good and "public" as bad feeds into the stupidity that's giving us endless gridlock and poor decision-making on a larger scale. Get your head out of your *** . Picking a fight where, instead, you need to find ways to correct correctable inefficiencies is just a waste of print. Enron was private and the FDA is public. If you want corporations that rape the public while adding no value, and you want poisoned food, go ahead and listen to this idiot.
Anti77
DARPA is funded by the Pentagon.
Not only did tax payer dollars invent the internet available on the ipad, but the computer technology of which it is based, the satellites and telecommunication tech it’s cell service works off, even the containers it’s shipped overseas in.
The private sector cannot operate at a loss for forty or fifty years to develop all of this. The government takes tax payer money funnels it through the Pentagon, NIH, NSF and formerly NASA and subsidizes and develops all high technology, the aviation industry, all telecommunications, half of complex drugs, lasers, agriculture, biotechnology and so on, then hands it over to the private sector once a profit can be made. Some of this technology is developed internally or at places like MIT or UCLA.
The tax payer pays all of the costs, takes all of the risks and shares in none of the profits. All of this is contrary to free market ideology. When jobs develop off of our tax investments they are summarily shipped overseas to exploit slave labor in poor countries.
The confusion lies where guys like Bill gates and Steve Jobs develop applications to existing technology and make science fiction level profits off of it. Without decades of previous tax payer investment they would never have been heard of. Small businesses operate largely within the free market doctrine. They also fail 85-90% of the time. Not exactly a persuasive statistic in which to run a country of over 300 million people off of.
gunkulator
How much money does the US military make? What about the court system? Police? Fire? Public education? Graham is seriously confused if he thinks gov't infrastructure should make money.
As to Apple and the iPad, Mr. Jobs did not invent the thing in a vacuum. Could it have been developed in a country that has no road system to transport it? A military to protect overseas shipments? A court system to prevent illegal duplication and theft? A gov't guaranteeing electricity everywhere to power ir? An educated populace who actually engineered it and also provide the consumers for it?
The right wing have a lot of silly notions about self reliance and doing it all yourself. The truth is we live in a very interconnected world and that's one of the reasons the US is so successful. Places like Somalia where there are little to no taxes or pesky gov't regulations never seem to come out any new innovations. Unless you buy into racist theories, the only possible explanation is their lack of gov't and the stability and safety it alone can provide. One man alone can never be safe, nor can he accomplish great things. We only succeed at great things when we live in interconnected communities working together.
kinwin
If Apple was in charge of healthcare, all US based doctors would be outsourced to China. When you get sick, you'll have to teleconference with a "doctor" in China who is working cruesome shifts in a factory for pennies, until they can't take it longer and commits suicide.
If you get diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, instead of undergoing surgery, you'd be given "alternative medicine", it works great, just look at Steve Jobs.
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