| I think you are underestimating the interplay between industry and government. Government come in and sometimes push forward the technology industry already has, mostly by just given those industries more investment money. But industry still invests gigantic amount of money to push technology forward and those innovations are constantly and consistently changing the game. Government invests something in X and then for the next 100 years people in forum can say 'see this only happened because of X'. But that ignores a lot of the work before and after to actually make it game changing. And what we also need to consider is that very often that huge government investment fails and goes nowhere. And at the same time large private investment can also fail. To conclude from this no private investment can ever be game-changing doesn't really follow. Starlink is a recent example that is pretty game-changing. Government didn't invest in it directly. Sure in the last 100s government invest in rocketry and electronics and antennas but so did private industry at a much larger overall rate (outside of rocketry). So I think, at the end of the day, government will always have its fingers in almost every pie and will always talk about their success and never talk about their failures. If Boom isn't successful, well you can't innovate without the government. If Boom is successful, well Boom profited from government investment in supersonic military technology so they couldn't have done it without government. So these kinds of arguments all circle in on themselves. At the end of the day, if you invest lots of money in something game-changing most of the time its gone go to shit, no matter who does it. |