OT
Except for maybe Henry Ford's, J. D. Rockefeller's, the founders of Google and Facebook, Bill Gates with Microsoft. Is that enough?
You are naming individual entrepreneurs. I was talking about whole sectors. Henry Ford would not have sold many autos without the roads that the govt built. Page and Brin would not have invented google w/o the internet, which was developed by government. The history of the transistor is a complicated one, mostly developed at Bell Labs, but the first big market for it was the military--as was true for a number of new inventions (including the internet). The military also played an important role in helping airlines get off the ground (so to speak), as did the post office.
When I say that the govt has given aid to many new sectors, I am not saying that entrepreneurs didn't do anything. Of course they did. As they do with alternative energy. I am saying that there is an important role for the government, especially in the early incubation stages, a complicated interaction that varies depending on circumstances and the nature of the invention and what is needed. Sometimes that includes direct loan guarantees or grants, sometimes it includes research, sometimes it includes giving land or rights to mine or depletion allowances. And that role is ignored when people sneer at it and repeat, "Guv'ment is the problem." |
