Government Doesn't Invent Anything New
by Joe?Pulcinella
I often get into discussions with lovers of government (which really means people who are afraid to think of a world without a maternal dictatorship such as ours) and I innevitably hear, "Without government, you wouldn't have GPS, or the Internet, or (insert other boondoggle here)..."
For those ninnies, I would like to suggest that government can never, ever conceive of any sort of value-added market. That is, a market that grows spontaneously from another free-market idea. Example: Shop21. Apparently, may people are getting wealthy making accessories for Apple's i-Pod, which in turn has made others wealthy beyond imagination.
Comments
Along those same lines, try to imagine getting fresh bananas to your kithcen without a free market. Bear in mind that we don't grow bananas in the US and bananas don't have nearly the shelf life of oil.
For those who think the gov't is responsible for trivial echno gadgets like GPS I offer this: W/O gov't interference, the commercial sector manages to locate oil reserves, drill and retrieve billions of gallons of it, ship it thousands of miles, refine it into many grades, ship it again locally, and dispense it into our gas tanks for barely about $2 a gallon. But I have to admit, we'd never have velcro without first investing billions into a space program
Ahem. The bogus idea that the government responsible for ginning up the (uneconomic)manufacture of certain goods originated in the early days of the railroads, accelerated greatly through the Cold War and the Space Race, and continues to this day. Left un-analyzed is the fact that these technologies only become commercialized DECADES later, after the federal vendors have had unlimited time and money to spend tinkering with them, and absolutley barring any private uses of the technologies long after they have ceased to have any unique military value. And one aside about GPS - in May 2000, President Clinton ordered turned off "Selective Availability", an intentional degradation of the signal introduced to prevent it being used to target, say, missiles against the US. In September 2001, terrorists flew planes into three buildings that they were manifestly unable to do with the planes' sophisticated navigation systems. So how did they pinpoint their targets within, say, 30 feet? Think about it.
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