We're still profiting from that. All those investment jumpstarted the modern, high-bandwidth, commercial internet as we know it.
For example, the overinvestment in data centers brought down the prices, which allows companies to host their web applications for only a few $100 per month instead of (ten)thousands like before.

Not to be glib, but remember that the foundation on which Bitcoin is built (SHA2, RIPEMD, elliptic curve cryptography, the Internet) can ultimately be traced back to government-funded research decades ago.  Investors and entrepreneurs are wonderfully efficient at taking a kernel of an idea, fleshing it out and pushing it forward, but you shouldn't delude yourself into thinking that "the taxman" is the useless blood-sucking squid in this story.

Right, because if you leave the money to the private sector this things would not have happen, even in a more efficient and cheap way.

So the government takes the money by force, reducing the resources the private sector can dedicate to these things, then does all this things in a inefficient and expensive way, and then asks us to thank it. Yeah...

Sorry, but this is a big hand waving and saying that the middle point is always better (a fallacy).

You are saying that the USA private sector does not invest long term or does not do it right. This is a lie. You then compare the capacity of the USA economy with the capacity of the country you come from, which probably is not comparable. But lets compare zones that can be compared, like the USA and Europe. In Europe medicine is basically in the hands of governments (although there are private insurances and hospitals), and in the USA it was more in private hands (although this is changing quickly). What do we see? The USA is one of the biggest innovators in medicine and basically decimates the medical innovations coming from Europe (and yes, I know that there is some government involvement in the USA medicine investigation, but the comparation is still valid).

What you are doing all the time is taking the position of a bully. I take the money from you by force, stopping you from using it and investing in investigation, spend it in an inefficient way to discover some things, and then claim that you need me to discover those things. The question you are not answering is: What would have happened if you left those resources to the private sector?

Yeah, I know. I was more thinking in a historical sense. That is why I pointed out that the situation has changed now.


But then, how can you compare? If the government is taking the money, the government is the one producing the investigation. But how can you claim that if left with the money the private sector would not have done better? Its a long and interesting discussion. But the point that its important to keep in mind is that the results of what we see now is not because the private sector can not investigate long term. Its the result of the government taking the resources needed to investigate from the private sector and using them. Pointing out that some discoveries were done by the government proves nothing.

I'm not.
It's hard to claim either way, it's predicting human behaviour.

if it wasn't perceived as governments role to do research, maybe bill gates and others would start a research fund instead of inoculating africa (or whatever he's doing). who knows.

boom/bust in individual businesses or even sectors of the economy is natural.
synchronized boom/bust of the entire economy is caused by central banks. without central banks a boom in one sector would drain the resources of another sector and therefore provide a regulator.
people don't like to give up food for network equipment.

...ahm...bitcoin! just to stay on topic...

Not too long ago, Steve Koonin (the provost of Caltech) went to work for BP as their chief scientist, and he made a very serious effort to encourage long-term investment in biofuels technology.  He remarked that the reaction of his superiors was that BP did not invest in anything without some potential for payoff within 5 years ("BP is not a charity" was the memorable phrase I remember), and what ended up coming out of these efforts was a private-public partnership with Berkeley, LBNL and UIUC.  This is the prime example I'm thinking of when I say that the private sector is great at pushing things in the short term, but that there is a need for public institutions to drive the long-term research.


A $30B+ NIH budget, bigger than the combined health research budgets of the members of the EU, and a pharma industry that's cutting jobs because it has too few new inventions in the pipeline?

http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/09/14/eli-lilly-to-cut-5-500-jobs-as-big-pharma-winter-approaches/

The research part you're thinking of is in no small part supported by the NIH.  Pharma spends big to implement existing ideas on a huge scale (say, screening 1,000,000 compounds against 1,000,000 targets to see if you get a hit), but many of the foundational ideas (say, discovering oncogenes as potential targets for drugs) come from basic research.  Moreover, if you're comparing total expenditures on healthcare, that's a very different beast (pick your poison: trial lawyers suing for malpractice or insurance companies/hospitals/HMOs spending 20-30% on administrative overhead).


And yet health indicators of the USA are much worse?  Europe is excellent at taking advantage of the research that comes out of the US and actually delivering it.


As one of the posters replied, this is very speculative.  But it's incorrect simply think that the government is taking money from you by force and that you are a hapless victim of the evil taxman.  For one, there are such things as public goods, that we are all better off having but individually worse off if we pay for them (the most prominent examples being police and defense).  Moreover, a lot of the income you receive is made possible by the quality institutions of your society (this is the idea of social capital, here's an interesting read: http://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/20061217.htm).  If you had been born in Uganda with an equal skill set to the one you currently have, you will almost certainly not earn anywhere near what you earn today.  If you disagree, you should put your money where your mouth is, renounce your citizenship and emigrate to Pakistan to enjoy a rock-bottom tax rate and low-cost services.  Third, there are such things as externalities, where you as an individual can impose costs on me without paying for them (think of the banksters netting all the profits and leaving us with the tab for the losses).  A good chunk of what government does is to neutralize these externalities, and make sure that it is the people imposing the external costs that are paying for them.

Personally, having seen the difference in quality of life and the functioning of society that good government buys in both the US and Europe, I am happy to pay my dues.

you agree without noticing it.

zero or negative interest rates (adjusted) are a signal that almost every investment is wortwhile, a signal everyone gets at the same time.

This is not related but anywyas:


The goverment is taking money by force. Its a fact. Lets see how you justify that Im not a victim of that.


Yes there are public goods, that is a completely different thing than government goods.


How does everybody have/own something? (and not, if the government owns something we dont all own it, the government owns it).


Bad examples. Long discussion. Not having it here.


Yes, social institution are important. They are in fact the basis of society. But you dont need a government to have social institutions.


True. Dont see your point.


Do I really need to answer this?


Externalities are the name you give to the violations of private property.


Because government takes away your right to private property.


This is not even an example of what you call externality.


On the contrary, the government creates these "externalities" by violating the property rights of the people.


You wanted to say: And making sure the politicians are the one in charge of dealing with this issues, not the people.


Im happy that you are happy fellow of the corporate regime. But if you really truly believe that the government does produce better results, why not make it voluntary? It will produce better results and will prevail anyway, why impose it? Unless you know it does not produce the best results.