"In point of fact" the reason nearly everyone on the planet has a cellphone is because Reagan broke up the AT&T monopoly, and deregulated phone service. This produced a competitive phone market and the rest is history.
What huh? There are so many things wrong with this that it's difficult to even catalogue them all. Let's try anyway:
1. The first steps in the R&D for cellular phone service goes back to the 1940s and 1950s. It didn't happen all at once in the 1980s.
2. The first Japanese cellular service was launched in the late 1970s. America wasn't even the leader on that one.
3. Oh wait, did you seriously just attribute government action, a mandate to break up AT&T, to the creation of cell phones in the same post where you said government mandates always stifles creativity? Oh my god you did.
4. No seriously, you did.
5. Reagan broke up AT&T? Silly me, I thought the antitrust lawsuit filed by the Justice Department, United States v. AT&T, that led to the divestiture was initiated in 1974. That would make the push to break the company up attributable to either Richard Nixon or Gerald Ford. Of course, since Reagan is an infallible saint I'm sure he somehow immaculately conceived the entire Department of Justice and independantly wrote the antitrust laws so this was really his victory even though he was Governor of California at the time.
6. AT&T developed a mobile telephone service as part of a car phone program in the 1940s. So it couldn't possibly be the case that AT&T had to be broken up to get to the mobile phone.
I'm sure there's more, but the staggering ignorance of that post was truly astonishing.
AT&T did not create the telephone monopoly, The government did. So they were hardly evil for being a monopoly. The government fixing a problem they created hardly makes them good in regard to business and innovation.
Seriously? I mean, I could have sworn AT&T was buying all those companies up regardless of whether or not the Government wanted them to.