RUSH: Here is an amazing story, and I want to share the details of this story with you, within the context that Obama is saying, that government’s going to mandate the invention of solar power and wind power. All these new green technologies, all this magical new energy, Washington and Obama are just going to dictate, just going to say, ‘Go do it,’ and it will happen. And, of course, that’s not how things happen. This is a story of 11-year-old Owen Voorhees. ‘[F]or the last nine months he climbed a mountain of doubt, overcame unfamiliar programming languages and poured over college-level computer science textbooks — all to develop his very own iPhone application. Last month, his app, MathTime, debuted in the App Store [at iTunes] and quickly rose to No. 13 in the paid, educational apps section.
‘The premise of MathTime is simple; it takes the old-fashioned flashcard ‘mad minute’ drill idea and adds a New Media twist. Participants can practice addition, subtraction, multiplication and division on the phone by quickly solving problems with two taps of the phone, one to show the problem, one to display the answer.’ ‘I thought it would be cool,’ said [11-year-old Owen Voorhees of] Hinsdale, Ill.-native, adding, ‘It’s really cool to make something work, to make a little money, to do something like this and see it up’ on the App Store. After he established the basic premise of the game, Owen’s 9-year-old brother Finn designed the mathematical symbols in Photoshop. Once the design was done, the boys pitched the program to Apple. ‘Nothing’s impossible if you don’t know it’s impossible,’ said John Voorhees, Owen and Finn’s father, who created an app account and provided a bank number for the boys.
”He dug into it all by himself. I didn’t touch a line of code,” that’s talking about his son. ‘The Apps Store has over 35,000 different iPhone applications and games available for download. ‘These two kids are unusually young to have done that, but the development environment is so easy, novice programmers with good ideas can now develop something compelling,’ said Matt Murphy, a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.’ Sounds like a law firm. ‘Murphy also manages the iFund, a $100-million fund devoted solely to investing in start-ups creating apps for the iPhone.’ Now, I have a question. Did a single president, member of Congress, or House of Representatives, or member of any statehouse give a speech one day and command the executives at Apple to create the iPhone?
Did they say, ‘You know what we need? We need an online computer place where we can buy music and store it and play it — and we need a device where we can download it like an iPod, and then when we got the iPod we need to put a phone in there’? Did government mandate any of this? No! Freedom, entrepreneurism, creativity. Now we’ve got an 11-year-old who built his own math app reading college-level textbooks. It’s people like this guy — when the time comes, if we still have the liberty and freedom — who are going to find the next unraveling of mysteries regarding energy. But Barack Obama doesn’t know a kilogram from a pound. He has never run or done or accomplished anything that is anywhere near the private sector. Yet Barack Obama claims to be the candy man, the magic man, who simply by virtue of his presence and demands will cause magic to happen. While he purposely, systematically sets about destroying the very environment where people like 11-year-old Owen Voorhees can triumph.