SamuelRSmith said:
| richardhutnik said:
You are posting this on the Internet. The Internet got its birth as a government initiative founded by the Department of Defense, to build a communications network that could withstand a nuclear war.
The private sector didn't produce an Internet. The private sector gave birth to the likes of AOL, Prodigy and Compuserve. All of these fell to the wayside by an entity that was birthed by a government initiative. Nothing the private sector came up with rivals this.
Same could be said about the likes of Spain sponsoring Christopher Columbus discovering the new world. Private enterprise didn't do this.
GPS is another government invention. None in the private sector produced this.
Libraries only exist now, due to government funding.
Large initiatives which benefit society almost never come about strictly from private sector involvement. There are things that the private sector can't even get near at all, because it isn't in the interest of the private sector to do it. Later on, once established, it is entirely possible for the private sector to take it over. But the public sector is the one that kicks it off.
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You're asking me to rewrite history. Fact is, we have no idea whether these things would have happened with or without Government, or whether similar alternatives would have emerged. We also do not know all of the technologies that we could have been enjoying today, if the private sector had not been stifled.
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We can look at where AOL and others were at the time, and see how they approached networks and doing that. The whole interconnectivity just isn't there now. The funding to get it off the ground wasn't either. The closest comparison we have to the Internet is cell phone companies, and their products now have to compete with the Internet.
The issue you are running into is that you are not able to come up with equivalents to what government initiatives have done. You can't justify your claim that there is NOTHING that government does that the private sector can't do better. And that is a problem, because you can't present evidence for your claim. The reality is that they didn't do it at all.
And the Internet has NOTHING to do with the private sector being stifled. The government didn't go in and block AOL, or Prodigy or Compuserve. If these solutions would of been better than the Internet, they would of existed in their old form, but they don't. They lost in the market to an initiative that the government offered. It is an initiative that is also complete with the net neutrality act and government involvement to level the playing field.
