Lennart Thornros <lenn...@thornros.com> wrote: > OK Jed. If your opion is that you have theRIGHT opinion, then it is > fruitless to discuss. > Look, this is not about opinions. There are thousands of books about the history of technology and commerce in the U.S. I challenge you to cite a single one of them which denies that the federal government subsidized steam ships, railroads, and the others on my list. These are *facts*, and not disputed by any mainstream historian.
Even large industries not directly subsidized got huge sums of government money. For example, the government did not directly subsidize Ford or General Motors in the 1920s, but it built billions of dollars worth of asphalt and concrete surface roads and later highways. Without these roads, automobiles would be useless. The government did not invent transistors or integrated circuits, but it was the first customer for them, and it spent billions of dollars on them for the military and for NASA. The price fell, reliability increased, and then they were introduced to consumer markets. The government always take over things , which can increase the government > and then makes it disfuncti8nal. That might not be a viable opinion but it > is mine. > The government does not "take over" things. That is preposterous. It is just the opposite. The government did not take over the Transcontinental Railroad -- it paid for it, and then handed it over the privately held railroad companies, the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific. It did not "take over" aviation -- it paid for it and then handed it over to Pan Am and the other nascent air carriers. It did not take over the Internet. It invented it, paid for it, built it up, and then handed it over the telephone companies. Ditto the computer, the laser, jet aircraft, nuclear energy and just about everything else. > I am a Swede. Alfred Nobel was also av Swede - no other similarities.. > He was an inventor. He made money but he had nothing to do with government. > WHAT? Who do you think paid for all that dynamite? What do you think they did with it? The first and biggest customer for nitroglycerin was the Transcontinental Railroad. It purchased thousands of tons, and made the industry out of nothing. Later, the biggest customers for dynamite and other modern explosives were the armies and navies of the world. The construction industry is also a major user of explosives. Government has heavily subsidized construction. It has paid for all infrastructure such as roads, highways, dams, large scale irrigation, bridges, subways, and so on, all of which depend on explosives. - Jed
