Would you have a personal computer without free markets?

The American Thinker ^ | May 15, 2009 | James Lewis

[Scanian]

Capitalism is creative. Obama's America promises to be excruciatingly boring, among many other flaws.

So two kids in a garage build something we now call a "micro computer" and end up beating Big Blue IBM and its hulking business empire. And then some Stanford nerds develop the software for Google; now they are the new IBM.

Repeat the story thousands of times, with most of them failing, and you have the digital-silicon-micro-web revolution, a series of technological tsunamis that swamped the old corporations, and the old government-run programs, to make it possible to do what you are doing right now.

Not bad, eh? The personal computer wasn't developed in the old Soviet Union, in spite of its ability to launch Sputniks and missiles, because it never allowed enough room for original individual thought. There are plenty of smart folks in Russia and China and Europe and the Middle East. None of them have done that kind of creative and original pioneering, not because they can't, but because they aren't given the freedom to be themselves. None of the conventional thinkers predicted the microcomputer. It was all because of the wild creative activity of stubborn individuals, working in their garages, or with a new internet protocol, or just canoodling around with their powerful little computers. Which nobody thought they were supposed to even have, a decade before.

[valkyry1]

Would you have a personal computer without free markets?

Most probably not. 

[Diogenesis]

In the late ‘60s, the HP35 and TI equivalent were
the dream of every non-American engineer in the world.

FREE market (not Marxism) replaced Napier’s bones.

Future generations would never know what a
“log-log deci trig” even was.

[muir_redwoods]

Look at what command economies produce; famine, corruption and Mao suits

[BipolarBob]

"Look at what command economies produce; famine, corruption and Mao suits

And look what we elected.

[ml/nj]

The real question is: would you have anything without Capitalism? Really! What product or even innovation was first developed in a socialist nation. A hula hoop, a cigar, what? All they can do is copy.

ML/NJ

[ikka]

A great example of this would be to look at the PC industry in Brazil during the 1990s. They had insanely high tariffs on imported PCs and tried to develop their own systems, which didn’t work.