imported post
tekshogun wrote:
marshaul wrote:
tekshogun wrote:
Government, behind on technology? Perhaps some levels and agencies of government may be behind, but as a whole, from the very top, the Federal level, government is the one driving much of the technology we use and look forward to using.
This is probably the most vastly overrated reality, ever.
Well, sure, one must realize that it is not driving ALL of our technology but everything from digital communications, the Internet, GPS, weapons, blah blah blah, come out of governement research or government contracts.
OK, weapons are the only valid one there. Weapons would have a severely restricted market. Very few gun nuts can afford stealth bombers and the like.
GPS, on the other hand, has been restricted from the market by the force of law. Government has appropriate demand for itself. In its absence, we would have stronger GPS technology, more freely available, at lower cost. This is a fact accepted by virtually everybody except for State shills.
Government "drives" GPS technology only by fiat. Only by the force of law was it able to claim sole demand to the most accurate GPS technology. This is a fact. And there's no valid reason the military needs better GPS than I do (or only statist reasons). When a technology has demand artificially reduced by legislative fiat, progress has not been in fact "driven" at all, but rather
hampered.
The notion that government can create the greater demand is rather absurd, in cases where you have a nascent or existing demand amongst the citizenry and their businesses. The government can only create demand by spending. Furthermore, the government's spending is limited by the extent of its resources, which are derived from an economy from which government can only extract fractions. Therefore, the sum of all total possible government-generated demand is necessarily a small fraction of the possible market-generated demand. Thus, a
free market will always provide the greater potential (and ultimately, realized) demand for
genuinely useful technological progress. This is how markets work. Not government.
Even if you look at its earliest origins, GPS was a military project bloated with bureaucratic inefficiency and military fantasy. The idea was to create a system that would function accurately without human oversight for an arbitrarily long period of time, so that the survivors had time dig themselves out of their bunkers after an imaginary nuclear attack, and, using GPS of course, initiate a retaliatory repopulation effort. To this end, the GPS system initially implemented at the government's behest was unnecessarily complicated and expensive, as well as resulting in extremely large and heavy satellites which are massively expensive to send into space.
Anyway, GPS driven by a civilian market would be cheaper, using inexpensive small satellites rather than ludicrously expensive government-paid-for units, more efficient, and would provide an decentralized, ad hoc infrastructure more amenable to rapid technological advancement and piecemeal expansion driven by spreading market demand. Basically, market-driven GPS would be better in every way, except to military fantasists.
Government deserves basically no credit for the internet. Essentially everything that defines the internet is what makes it NOT darpanet (if that makes any sense). Basically, the protocols upon which the internet is run were designed, in contrast to their predecessors, to be inherently open and decentralized. It's inherently anti-governmental in operation, by design.
The reality is that all communications technology is more profitable in the private sphere. Profit drives progress. Therefore, government does not drive communications progress. It merely jumps on the bandwagon early with stolen money and takes all the credit, asserting "we wouldn't have this if we didn't steal money to produce it!".
Theft is rarely justified, either in principle or through utilitarian aims.
Edit: Significant edits for clarity.
