Respond to this socialist statement..

[Nate K]

Government funded science/technology research is a huge reason we are at the place we are today technologically. Without Government funded research would there be an internet? Would there be computers like we have today? No.

It's important for the government (ie "taxpayers") to fund the research that private corporations often don't (because they don't see an immediate profit to be made.)

Socialism is a good thing. It really is.

I recommend reading up on history. It's very enlightening.

I didn't respond for the moment (not involved), wondering how some of you would respond to that.

[Jeremy]

It's my understanding that both private and government research led to the internet. Without government research, the private sector would still get there. And remember that with less taxation, charity and research would rise dramatically. Without government intervention who knows how advanced we'd be today.

[jdmyprez_deo_vindice]

Without government funded research would would also not have nuclear bombs, lab created anthrax and other biological weapons and threats of super plagues escaping from labs and destroying all of humanity.

[Truth Warrior]

"The thought of how far the human race [might] have advanced without government simply staggers the imagination." -- Attributed to Doug Casey, 1979

http://i75.photobucket.com/albums/i304/Truth_Warrior/Socialism_by_miniamericanflags.jpg

[apropos]

It is important to realize that things like the Internet and the highway system are the patina of respectable activities the government has engaged in that improved quality of life for your average American. We'll never know if 2009 would be the same, better, or worse had the government stayed completely out of developing the Internet, or left it to private enterprise to create a network of highways crisscrossing the nation. We will never know and so cannot accurately argue for or against it. Theories are the best one can offer in such a case.

The key issue is that while the government can give you the Internet and highways, you also get things like Iraq, the Patriot Act, the 'bailout' and 'stimulus' bills, Guantanamo Bay, and all the myriad things people hate about their government. If the government was just pure evil and participated in unquestionably evil things all the time by all its members, it would be easy. But that is a caricature of the reality. Past projects like the highway system and the Internet have improved peoples' lives and make final judgment harder for the majority of people to make. What we need to understand is that you have to take the good with the bad, and sometimes the bad outweighs the good.

[Truth Warrior]

IF the US Federal government was just one individual ("BIG BROTHER"), NOBODY would have anything to do with him.<IMHO>

[LibertyEagle]

There has got to be a good article out there that we can point him to that shows that it is the market that best decides the allocation of capital; as opposed to a group of lawyers sitting on Capitol Hill.

Socialism is about believing the latter. What do these politicians know about the car industry, or any other industry for that matter? All they can do is throw money at something like darts at a dart board and every once in a great while, the dart will land on something good, like the internet. But, think of all the wasted taxpayer dollars that they lobbed out, whilst I must say, first lining their own pockets and those of their cronies.

[Kraig]

If the government was just pure evil and participated in unquestionably evil things all the time by all its members, it would be easy. But that is a caricature of the reality. Past projects like the highway system and the Internet have improved peoples' lives and make final judgment harder for the majority of people to make. What we need to understand is that you have to take the good with the bad, and sometimes the bad outweighs the good.

Everything the government does IS evil! Even those 'good' things that you mention, where done at someone's expense, through theft. Evil enough for me.

What we really need to understand is that we DON'T have to take the good with the bad. The are other options besides A and B presented to us.

[Kraig]

It's my understanding that both private and government research led to the internet. Without government research, the private sector would still get there. And remember that with less taxation, charity and research would rise dramatically. Without government intervention who knows how advanced we'd be today.

The internet as created by the military was nothing like what we see today. The internet today for the most part HAS been created by the private sector. Lookup each and every technology that the internet requires, for almost all of them you will find that companies like Intel, Microsoft, etc. funding the R&D.

[Truth Warrior]

Big Brother's Nolan chart.


http://i75.photobucket.com/albums/i304/Truth_Warrior/BB.png

:p

[Mahkato]

The government gave us the Interstate system. Do people like the Interstate? Usually. Is it useful for commerce? Yes. But that which is not seen is all the private railroads that were not built because the "free" roads were instead. We'd very likely have high-speed rail connecting all major cities by now if the Interstate system had not been built. Instead, we have a nation built on cheap oil and seemingly cheap roads, and we are just beginning to pay for that mistake.

What would we have if the government hadn't funded the internet?

[Elwar]

Back in the 1930s AT&T was facing harsh punishment by the government for underhanded tactics against their competitors. In a back and forth fight for years (and a lot of lobbying to the right lawmakers) the end result was AT&T would settle the case by getting phone technology to all homes in the United States with the small request that AT&T become the sole phone company for the United States.
So from the 1930s to the 1980s they went from switchboard technology to mechanical switches as their huge revolutionary technology progresses in the phone industry.

After 1984, when the phone industry monopoly was broken up, digital switching was developed and technologies started getting better with more competition. Then in the 1990s when the phone industry was completely deregulated (In as true a sense of deregulation as the government has ever "allowed") things really took off. Calling long distance used to be something you kept short and sweet, knowing that the meter was running and the bill would be high, now you call long distance with no thought of time nor distance.

The only role the government played in this boost in technology was that they got out of the way.

Now people in government want another 1930s...secure todays technology in stone through a combination of government and industry so that things are fair for all. Ignoring the 50 years of squeeze that will be put on any technological advances.

[TastyWheat]

Government may have laid some of the groundwork for the internet, but I remember the old internet and it was lame as hell. AOL, Prodigy, and BBS's were the norm and they were nothing to get excited about except for the super tech geeks (think Commodore 64). Private companies, businesses and individuals made it what it is today. Yahoo, Hotmail, Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, and eBay were all private ventures that made the internet way more useful to all. Plus, the government didn't invent or provide any funding for the iPod, HDTV, the combustion engine, the traffic light, or solid-state drives. Furthermore, a lot of these new technologies become relatively cheap relatively quickly. My family isn't stinking rich and we have two flat screen televisions. I also just bought an 8GB flash card the size of my fingernail for less than $20!

[Xenophage]

I didn't respond for the moment (not involved), wondering how some of you would respond to that.

OK!

So, all those people who like to invent new things, who are driven to discover and explore the Universe would just sit around in an uninspired stupor if it wasn't for the government, right?

Nobody EVER funded science that wasn't motivated by the need to murder and spy for the military. Besides, even if some misdirected fool decided to spend money funding scientific research, private dollars are WAY different than public dollars in that they are less motivational!

Because in order to fund science, you have to steal the money first. Nobody actually WANTS to pursue science so we have to force them!

YEAH!

[sdczen]

"The thought of how far the human race [might] have advanced without government simply staggers the imagination." -- Attributed to Doug Casey, 1979

http://i75.photobucket.com/albums/i304/Truth_Warrior/Socialism_by_miniamericanflags.jpg

Is there a bumper sticker of this somewhere??? If not, there should be.

[newbitech]

Without Government funded research would there be an internet? Would there be computers like we have today? No.

Short answer: absolutely, the backbone of the net and computers was being put in the ground LONG before ARPANET came along. Did government research shape the development of computers and the internet? Absolutely, but there is no evidence that this has been a good thing.

Long answer
The person you are arguing with needs to do some fact checking. Here let me get you started. (Hint, the internet falls under the umbrella of Telecommunications).

In November 1937, George Stibitz, then working at Bell Labs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs), completed a relay-based computer he dubbed the "Model K" (for "kitchen table", on which he had assembled it), which calculated using binary addition. Bell Labs subsequently authorized a full research program in late 1938 with Stibitz at the helm. Their Complex Number Calculator, completed January 8 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_8), 1940 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1940), was able to do calculations on complex numbers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_numbers). In a demonstration to the American Mathematical Society (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Mathematical_Society) conference at Dartmouth College (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_College) on September 11 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11), 1940 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1940), Stibitz used a teletype (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype) to send commands to the Complex Number Calculator in New York over telephone lines. It was the first computing machine ever used remotely over a phone line. (See the commemorative plaque and the hall where this event took place in the photos below.)
Stibitz held 38 patents, in addition to those he earned at Bell Labs. He became a member of the faculty at Dartmouth College (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_College) in 1964 to build bridges between the fields of computing and medicine, and retired from research in 1983. Replicas of the "Model K" reside in both the Smithsonian Institution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smithsonian_Institution) and the William Howard Doane Library at Denison University.

[Working Poor]

I just wish I could live my life without any government intervention.

[euphemia]

Has it occurred to anyone that we might have better technology and we might have had it sooner if the government hadn't been involved in it to begin with?

[akihabro]

Last time I checked my computer didn't say "made by U.S government." Socialism didn't build this either. The government only does 3 things right: Screw things up, make a large military and make itself more powerful.

[Conza88]

The myth that government created the internet (http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/023540.html)
Posted by Michael S. Rozeff at October 16, 2008 07:45 PM

Government supporters like to suggest that the internet is a government project. They claim that the computer industry owes its existence to the Pentagon. Neither of these claims is true. The internet grew when the Pentagon took its hands off of it. Computers were developed without the Pentagon.

These inventions have military applications and defense departments have always been very interested in them, but the defense departments did not develop them.

Actually the explosive growth of the internet occurred when the net went civilian and grew out of its military background and control. The defense department control was holding it back. Private capital and ideas poured in. It is true that people at subsidized universities and NSF grants also contributed.

If there had been none of the defense involvement, would the internet have occurred? Yes. Can we say that it was pure free market capitalism? No. We cannot say this because the major companies that would have done this anyway all had defense and government links anyway, such as IBM and ATT.

But the internet would have occurred anyway, and the lure of profits for these big companies played a role. In fact, the defense department's ARPANET project (started in 1969) only occurred because of earlier inventions by capitalists.

IBM and ATT had major labs and were vitally interested in computers talking to one another as early as the late 1950s and early 1960s. Bell Labs invented UNIX in 1969; it made the internet possible. IBM invented FORTRAN and hard drives in 1956. Bell transmitted packet data over lines in 1958. Texas Instruments invented integrated circuits in 1958. In 1961 Leonard Kleinrock published a paper on packet switching networks. Bell Labs made the first modem in 1961. The mouse was invented in 1963. Digital Equipment Corporation produced the first minicomputer in 1964. In 1965 time sharing at MIT and mail command started. Intel began in 1968. The year 1966 saw the first use of fiber optics to carry telephone signals.

After the defense department got involved, it was still companies like Honeywell and Bolt Beranek Newman (a tiny company) that made headway on making the internet work.

There were only 500 hosts on ARPANET when it split into military and civilian sections in 1983. Then the explosive growth began.

There is much more history than this. I am sure by now there are entire books on the subject and hundreds more major internet developments of which I am blissfully unaware.

[NMCB3]

The internet is easily seen, what about the things that are not seen? What about all the things that have not been invented because every dollar government used to fund internet research was stolen from the private sector. What of the kids that went without, the cures for disease not discovered, the alternative fuels that were never utilized because of governments vast plunder and redistribution of wealth? Socialism is evil, anyone who advocates it is a dupe or a knave.

[NationaliseIt]

NASA did some spiffy stuff in the 60s

[TruckinMike]

Back in the 80's me and my 8088 (The original IBM PC was the most influential microcomputer to use the 8088. It used a clock frequency of 4.77 MHz) enjoyed many privately run and created bulletin boards. There was no government involvement of any kind Just me, ma bell, and a bboard.. --- The internet sprung from both private bulletin boards, et.al... and the government funded universities. But even without the internet system as we know it - private bulletin boards were the internet of old -- Most were totally private. Who needs the government???

PS- And from what I hear, BBoards are making a comeback. --They never left the ham world.

TMike