Ebb and Flow of Idiocy Among Interweb Writers ☀
Jackie Gleason cheers as Obama ends moon visit
The Bell System was finally put to rest in 1984.
Now, I’d like to examine the results of the government endorsed monopoly.
In this vapid screed, the author celebrates the U.S. government scraping of space initiatives, buttressing his joy by citing the poor innovation results from the state sanctioned monopoly.
Ironically, Mr. McGowan published these words on a medium, created by such a public sector initiative.
Even the most ignorant American must know that computers, satellites, transistors, the Internet, etc.… were all creations of the public sector.
Not to belabor pros and cons of NASA cuts (for which, irrelevantly, I’m uncertain of which path I endorse), I simply desire to focus solely on the absurdity of bashing AT&T for paucity of technology innovation.
Mr. McGowan, have you ever heard of Bell Labs? Bell Labs created the transistor. In a private laboratory, yes, but it belonged to a government sanctioned monopoly. Since it was a monopoly, it was a prodigious source of innovation, in part, because it could charge monopoly prices (in effect, a tax) to support research and development on a larger scale. After deregulation, Bell Labs became a less fruitful enterprise.
Or have you no knowledge of CERN? You know, that World Wide Web you have at your disposal to share your scrawling output — it was a CERN project.
Yes, I concede that the private sector is more efficient in generation of consumer oriented applications of the technology. But this mythos about bumbling, incompetent government technocrats incapable of advancing technology, in comparison with a razor efficiency of private industry is bunk beyond absurdity. Our history illustrates this clearly, yet many gleefully wallow in ignorance, embracing the sophistry of nihilistic utopian libertarian tracts.
The private sector is heralded as champions of progress, when truth is, the relationship is a bit more parasitical — great achievements in knowledge and technology spurred by government largess all at the public expense, before being given away to private industry to reap immense profits. Naturally, consumers benefit too in this arrangement, as they eventually are showered with the loot of affordable tech goodies and gadgets. Though, I’ll defer discussion of the externalities imposed in such a system to a later missive.
