Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum says that 20 years ago people couldn’t even imagine cell phones, but now they are commonplace because Americans “recognize the rights God has given every person.”

Speaking to supporters in Chillicothe, Ohio on Friday, the former Pennsylvania senator explained that the U.S. had “transformed the world” with the a new form of government.

ADVERTISEMENT

“In the previous 2,000 years, life did not change,” he said. “And then America came around and said, ‘No, no more dictators, no more kings, no more classes, no more nobility.’ We believe in limited government, not an all-powerful state. We believe that if we liberate people, we recognize the rights that God has given every person then the world will change.”

“How many people have a cell phone?” he asked. “The young folks here, 20 years ago, there were no cell phones to speak of. And now people who 20 years ago couldn’t conceive of a cell phone, now can’t live without one.”

“Let me assure you if the government had taken over the technology sector of our economy 25 years ago, no one would ever have heard of a cell phone. Because what we would be doing is we would be making sure everybody had pagers and allocated them equivalently across everybody.”

According to the nonprofit research institute SRI International, over 10 million Americans had cell phones by 1992.

Watch this video from CNN, broadcast March. 2, 2012.

ADVERTISEMENT