No, labor did not create the iPhone

Or Twitter, or Facebook, or Tesla, or IBM, or anything in your house

If you’ve been on Twitter recently(or at this same time last year)you may have seen the #ResistCapitalism hashtag trending. Twitter communists and other social misfits have been organizing this for a while, carefully constructing their arguments in an attempt to sway the masses away from favoring capitalism. Unfortunately for these twitter warriors, people seem to notice the hypocrisy of using modern technology invented by capitalist economies to spew communist propaganda. Though luckily for the commies, they came up with a rebuttal: capitalism didn’t create anything, labor did.

It is true that labor made everything in our society possible. Without the common laborer basic necessities like food, housing and more would be scarce. Laborers play an extremely important role in any economy, but they are certainly not responsible for the technological breakthroughs of the past century, capitalists are.

Without capitalists and capitalism, technological innovation aren’t needed nor encouraged(or in some cases allowed). Why would Steve Jobs put his time and effort into developing Macintosh when his reward for his hardwork would be severely taxed in a socialist economy? How could Jeff Bezos change the way we shop online and help pioneer the private space exploration industry when there’s no private businesses in a communist society? Without these capitalists risking their entire careers in the name of innovation, who will progress our society?

It definitely won’t be the government that non-capitalist societies relay on. Why? Because the people researching and developing won’t be spending their own money like Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs did. Take for example post-civil war America. The government funded transcontinental railroads such as the Union Pacific. Even with government funding, the Union Pacific went bankrupt several times. Meanwhile, James J. Hill built the Great Northern Railway from St. Paul to Seattle, all with his own money. Similarly, President McKinley declared building an airplane a national emergency. He picked the best aeronautics expert in the country and President of the Smithsonian Institution, Samuel Langley, to undergo this task. Langley was unable to build an airplane, even with the seemingly endless amount of money the government could supply. Nonetheless, nine days after Langley declared building an airplane to be impossible, the Wright brothers made their first flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina — using only two thousand dollars of their own money.

These capitalists bettered our country, doing what government could not. Yes, laborers built the Great Northern Railway, but it was Hill’s personal financial risk that made it possible. Did the Wright brothers need laborers to later mass produce their flying machines? Yes, but without their two thousand dollars and capitalistic mindset we might still be relaying on railways and boats to travel the world.

Simply put, capitalist economies get things done socialist and communist economies couldn’t dream of, all with the help of laborers.