[gridlockd]

This is a meme that has been adopted by leftists wholesale. The basic premise is that since any innovation can be somehow tracked backed to government investment, the government is somehow responsible for most innovation.

It disregards the whole process that is required to take insights from research into a real product.

Yes, the internet was developed by the military. Only when private enterprise took over did it become valuable to society as a whole.

Yes, the iPhone builds on technology that originated from public research, just like all the cellphones before it. However, it wasn't a government committee that decided how to assemble all these technologies into something that people were ready to pay $1000 for.

We have lots of evidence that that the government is in fact a terrible entrepreneur that builds terrible products and services. One can point at the awful primary/secondary education, or at the DMV, or perhaps at the rollout of healthcare-dot-gov.

Even the "communist" Chinese government understands that private enterprise is the way to economic prosperity, it just disagrees on the degree of state control.

[ivanhoe]

One could also argue the opposite, that commercializing an invention is much more obvious, faster and WAY CHEAPER step than inventing the tech need for it? And I agree with you that Government is a terrible entrepreneur, but that's actually a good thing, because its huge budgets and the lack of interest in making money out of it, is exactly what keeps pure science per science's sake projects alive. Lots of R&D that government finances has completely different goals than entrepreneurs would, like getting competitive advantages over foreign players or solving strategically important problems. No business person in their right mind would ever finance flying a man to moon, or research on distributed, fault-tolerant communication system for post-nuclear war world, nor anyone would be able to predict ahead all technologies that could come out of that research, it's impossible to do. So we need both steps for progress, both the government trowing tax payers money on seemingly silly R&D, and entrepreneurs looking for new ways to monetize it later.

[gridlockd]

> One could also argue the opposite, that commercializing an invention is much more obvious, faster and WAY CHEAPER step than inventing the tech need for it?

Not necessarily, or at least it doesn't readily compare. Sure, if I first have to develop all the physics dating back to Newton on my own, building a piece of electronics would be very expensive.

But let's say some researcher at a university discovers the field effect that could be useful for semiconductors. That researcher's lifetime salary will likely be far smaller than the cost required to actually bring their findings into the actual microprocessors.

> So we need both steps for progress, both the government trowing tax payers money on seemingly silly R&D, and entrepreneurs looking for new ways to monetize it later.

If we're talking about massive infrastructure projects, I agree that there's no one else but the government to do it. Whether those projects are warranted is a different matter.

However, if we're just talking about university R&D, it's not clear to me that if it wasn't for the government that it couldn't be financed. A university attracts students (and thus financing) in large parts because of its research.

[sprafa]

True. I believe the idea is more that Government does a TON of basic R&D, while private industry is not that good at doing 10-20 year programs while Government can do pretty decent things with it. I don’t think it’s an either/or, it’s more of an argument against deciding government should leave all R&D to private industry, which might not be as good at it as a superficial analysis might make appear.