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Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

What are examples of the state actually achieving a research objective better than free enterprise?

The majority of research advances in medicine have been done with NIH grants and the free enterprise only afterwards did the "productization" of it.

The ENTIRE technology core of the US. The government channels taxpayer money to state research organizations like DARPA. They invent things like the Internet. Then they turn over those to the private sector for profit.

The majority of core research has been backed by government funds for a while now. Commercialization and mass market adoption is typically where private enterprise steps in.

Nuclear Energy and space telescopes come to mind.

I’m not sure, but what about the space program in the 1960s?

I thought of that too. I don't know enough about it to know if it's a legit counterpoint. My view is that real competition is necessary to efficiently and effectively get to a solution, versus focusing on the bureaucratic mechanics of running the machine that's supposed to be building the solution, which is what happens when government takes things on.

But the space program, and maybe the Manhattan project, actually had real, credible competition, even if it wasn't economic, so maybe were able to escape the bureaucratic trap. Something less urgent (even if it is on paper) like antibiotic resistance, I'm not convinced presents the kind of competition that would actually substitute for a competitive market.

> I don't know enough about it to know if it's a legit counterpoint.

Its a gigantic counterpoint. A large swath of the technology used today was developed by NASA and then turned over to the private corporations for them to profit. Socializing the costs. Privatizing the profits.

The Internet iself an argument. It was developed at DARPA with taxpayer money. Then turned over to the private corporations so that they could profit. Another case of socialism for the corporations.

With the Internet the government got their pound of flesh through taxation of all the new enterprises that sprung up because of their investments , so I wouldn’t make it sound so negative.

> With the Internet the government got their pound of flesh through taxation of all the new enterprises that sprung up because of their investments

Really. With all the tax breaks and ongoing lowering of the top tax bracked for corporate profit. Even as they offshore their legal entity to dodge taxes...

Even if the capital gains taxes were 90% like back in Eisenhower era and it was actually enforced, that still wouldn't justify handing over publicly funded research to private actors to profit. Publicly funded everything should be made publicly available and usable.

I think this is overstatement as to 'turning it over.' DARPA paid for research and operated communications systems in furtherance of a standardized packet network. This was done largely with privately developed tech like commercial telephone wires, commercial modems, commercial minicomputers, commercial solid state RAMs, commercial storage tech. The benefit of DARPA's big funding boost was consolidation, sharing, selection of objectively reasonable choices like tcp/ip, and allowing international collaborators. This sped up the process of having a viable, unified internet wherein other researchers who were not even in the United States contributed tech like the web (on Next computers, with Next software stacks, Motorola chipsets, Sony CRT tech, etc).

> This was done largely with privately developed tech like commercial telephone wires, commercial modems, commercial minicomputers, commercial solid state RAMs, commercial storage tech

Same happened with all of those. The government created the tech, then paid private corporations to implement it, literally funding the everything from scratch while the private corps grabbed the profits.

> This sped up the process of having a viable, unified internet

That's false. Chile's Socialist president was at the point of launching their Internet in mid 70s. Which was ended by the US backed coup.

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