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by amh
5713 days ago
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It's far from clear that the things you list couldn't have been developed without government intervention. Unfortunately, without an alternate fork of reality to try the experiment, we'll never know. But the idea that because something was developed using government funds, it could never have been developed without them, is a logical fallacy. |
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There is a reason why people joke about selling bridges yet simultaneously rely on bridges for their commutes in and out of work: some things, if you try to make them profitable from the get-go will never achieve the scale necessary for them to provide utility. One of the many functions of Government is to provide a mechanism for the economy to move beyond a suboptimal economic maxima. Spending money on infrastructure, like bridges, does exactly this. No private firms will build a bridge because they can't make money off of it, but all private firms benefit from the increased availability and mobility of labor. The pre-bridge state of affairs is a suboptimal maxima. (Protip: WWII military spending enabled the US to escape the suboptimal maxima of the Great Depression. That is, government spending, of which, military spending is among the least effective at creating jobs and improving the economy.)