[paganel]

> Are "we" now going to say the state is better at innovating than the private sector? Under what conditions?

At greater scale the State is definitely better at innovating compared to the private sector. Look at the internet itself and at www (CERN is basically a state project), and if we want to go even larger look at the war industry.

There's no way a "private entity" would have had the gall to build some rockets in order to bomb out London and its environs, and without the V2 rockets we probably wouldn't have had NASA and we wouldn't have had two private persons ~70 years later (Musk and Bezos) trying to build and innovate in private and with lots and lots of money what the Nazi regime did in 1943-1945 while being bombed out to hell and back by the Allies.

And then there's the entire nuclear industry which wouldn't have happened without Nagasaki and Hiroshima, both state-run (killing) projects.