[regularization]

> Go back far enough and there was only private industry, and no government funding until the space race basically.

How do you think the railroads were built in the US? The bonds of the Pacific Railroad Acts date back to the 1860s. Pretty easy to build a railway line when government foots the bill.

[absolutelastone]

Government funding of research. We were talking about the NSF after all, not free markets versus central planning.

On that though, I read somewhere that the hierarchical committee-led operation of the funding agencies is the same way communist systems dole out money for everything else too. Not sure if they were being completely serious.

[regularization]

From 1901 up to FDR's election in 1932, 5 Americans won Nobel Prizes in the sciences. There was not much government funding back then, and not much was going on either.

[absolutelastone]

There was a massive tech boom in that time with technologies like cars, electricity, and communications.

[brewdad]

Doesn’t that pretty much describe every corporate hierarchy as well? It isn’t communist, it’s the nature of any large organization.

[absolutelastone]

So your argument is that nothing is communism? The fact that it's a single large organization allocating resources is rather key to the whole point. That the same organizational structure doing it is interesting to me anyway. I suspected this line of thinking is too triggering for some people though.

A corporation is not an economic system, just a tiny participant of one. And I'd rather describe their decision making as hierarchical yes, but by middle managers implementing the agendas of higher ups, not necessarily by committees. When they operate by committee they tend to be at their worst...