Lennart Thornros <lenn...@thornros.com> wrote: > Jed, the logic you provide is that because government has initiated or > built large projects they have subsidized Alfred Nobel's invention of > dynamite. That is a logic used by the communist. > No, it is the logic of an historian. It is a fact that the U.S. government was the largest user of explosives from 1860 to 1875, first in the Civil War and then in the Transcontinental Railroad and other massive construction projects. The Railroad was the largest construction project in history up until then, and it required fantastic amounts of explosives. It was followed by many other railroad construction projects, which also required explosives on the scale of a war.
Governments use explosives more than other institutions because they run armies and navies. This is why the U.S. government invented nuclear weapons, and spent trillions of dollars on them. There is no question Alfred Nobel's money came mainly from governments spending, especially at first. Later, mining and other industries began using a lot of dynamite. You wrote before that Nobel "made money but he had nothing to do with government." That is wrong. His money had EVERYTHING to do with government. Government created the demand for his product, and it was his main customer. There have been other inventors whose work was not so directly involved in government, such as Edison. You happened to pick Nobel, whose invention would probably not exist without government demand. My point is that those inventors i mentioned and many more i know less > about, had freedom to do inventions and reap the benefit. > Freedom is important, but no inventor could survive without government enforced patent protection. Abraham Lincoln wrote: [The patent laws] began in England in 1624, and in this country with the adoption of our Constitution. Before then any man [might] instantly use what another man had invented, so that the inventor had no special advantage from his own invention. The patent system changed this, secured to the inventor for a limited time exclusive use of his inventions, and thereby added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius in the discovery and production of new and useful things. Without the government, there would be no protection of inventions, so no inventions and no progress. - Jed
