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Yes.

They helped reduce the cost and increase the performance of a well understood system with a variety of incremental innovations. Well done. I hope that company goes on to make a lot of money from the spread of their reduced costs, and those of the costs borne by the grateful public.

But they didn't develop ultrasound. Governments funding massive universities and militaries did.

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Also governments funding space programs...

...funded by profits generated from the private sector?

...a private sector built on technological innovations whose initial development was funded by the government.

See what I did there?

It's not a question of "who's better, public or private industry?" We need to recognize that our system is built on a symbiosis of both.

And where did governments get the funding for those investments?

I think it's what he is saying. Govs take money from the private sector to develop long term things, that the private sector won't have the leverage and the pockets to do, but the aggregate of a whole nation can. What OP is saying is that we need both. States to do basic and fundamental long term research. And applied, short term, cost reducing research, to give what the gov helped discover to the public at large.

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