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Comment by ramanujan | Hacker News Reader

> Sometimes it takes the government

Hmmm. Not disagreeing that some things funded by government grants have been worthwhile, but almost every scientific discovery before the WW2 period was funded independently of the government -- including big ticket areas involving fundamental research like automobiles, railroads, and aviation.

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Well, most railroad expansion was due to a govt act giving tons of land rights and other highly valuable privileges to anyone laying track in the territories - the TransContinental railroad was laid this way.

However, quite true on the rest.

A private company did it the honest way and laid a more efficient track. The government paid per mile of track laid which you can imagine can go wrong all kinds of ways.

A very good point - though as a counter the plank-road mania of the early 1800's was a fully private sector road bubble: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plank_road

Only after the crash of 1857. Prior to that American railroad networks were quite decentralized and much more competitive (not only with themselves, but also with canal systems). Most were financed by local entrepreneurs and often by the British and American companies that sold track on credit.

BTW: This sub-comment thread is a testament to how good HN still is at bringing together reasonable/thoughtful people - thanks guys.

This might be true in some fields, but there was plenty of government research pre-WW2 in epidemiology and public health. Look up Walter Reed in the Wikipedia for an example of what I'm talking about.

Of course, it should be mentioned that much of that pre-WW2 government research was a) actually sponsored by the military, or by government entities that had strong military roots, and b) was of questionable ethical quality by today's standards.

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