China’s government support for basic research has enabled it to quickly catch up to U.S. We are locked in an economic battle for leadership in critical emerging technologies such as genetic engineering, advanced telecommunications, and supercomputing. Today, the same kind of government support is needed to fend off the challenge from China.
The 12 major technologies that make possible the iPhone, including GPS, multi-touch screens, and key aspects of cellular technology emerged directly or indirectly from government-funded research. The creation of the internet itself was funded by the government. The government’s visible hand in American business continued, and in more recent times led to the birth of the digital era. Cold War government demand for microchips for missiles and space exploration alone reduced the price of a single chip from $32 in 1961 to $1.25 just 10 years later. Innovations from World War II brought vast improvements to flight technology, medicine, and more. Wars and the Cold War, though they brought great tragedy, were also great accelerators of the technology that business would later capitalize on. Strategically, they were enacted to help block the spread of slave-based plantations to the newly acquired territories. Abraham Lincoln’s Homestead Acts were a boon to small farmers and helped settle the West. Government land sales and grants also boosted business. These projects were simply too large to finance with private capital, but they transformed the nation’s private sector business. The epochal transportation projects in our early history, including the Erie Canal, which defined its era, and the Transcontinental Railroad, which bound the nation together, would not have been possible without government support. After the war, Alexander Hamilton and Tench Coxe led the government’s active promotion of “useful manufactures” and even aided in the theft of secrets from Industrial Revolution pioneers in Britain. The two have been deeply enmeshed, for better or worse, throughout the country’s history.Īmerica’s government actively intervened during the American Revolution, teaching the art of interchangeable parts and financing the expansion of small manufacturers. government and business have always been permeable and blurred. In fact, the government has often played a beneficial role in the market, and the lines between the U.S.
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