The “socialism,” of course.

Check out a recent, great article at US Uncut about how taxpayers funded, through the Defense Department, the National Science Foundation, and other government programs, innovations that made smartphones possible.  Indeed, the “horrors” of “socialist”-esque cooperation gave us the iPhone, yet we are expected to buy (literally) into the cult of personality that one entrepreneurial genius put it all together all by his lonesome with only his sheer force of of will and of course, self-pulled-up bootstraps. Nonsense.

From the article:

“…all of the smart technology that goes into iPhones is a creation of socialism. And everything that Apple sells to make obscene profits (which are taxed at ridiculously low rates thanks to Apple’s cunningly evil accounting practices) was made possible by government-funded research. Even Google’s algorithm was created with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Aside from all of that, Apple as a corporation may not even exist as it does today were it not for government loans to startup businesses. The Harvard Business Review pointed out how Apple was a direct beneficiary of socialism in its earliest stages:

[Apple] also received its early stage finance from the U.S. government’s Small Business Investment Company program. Venture capitalists entered only after government funding had gotten the company to the critical proof of concept.

None of the major components in the iPhone would have been possible without scientific breakthroughs garnered from publicly-funded research. Here are a few examples outlined in economist Mariana Mazzucato’s book, The Entreprenurial State…”

Brings to mind a favorite saying of David Graber’s (this is a really close paraphrase): “Capitalism is just a really bad way of organizing socialism.”