Listen up, Libertarians!

   This afternoon,  I was driving across a remote section Nebraska on I- 80, and my wife was using her laptop computer, equipped with an "air card,"  to access the internet for information on where to find a restaurant. Few activities so evoke images of modernity and personal independence as that of being able to surf the net while cruising the interstate at 75 mph, a hundred miles from nowhere.  And the acolytes of extreme private enterprise would surely cite this as the supreme example of the technological triumph of the free market.  No doubt, if they themselves were using the net while also using the interstate, the emails they sent would include political diatribes about how "big government" is the enemy of progress and individual freedom.  But is it?
     For the technological opportunity I just described to exist, a number of things had to occur.  First, the freeway system had to be built.   It was built by government.   In fact, it is the largest single engineering project in human history,  and except for WWII,  the greatest public expenditure in American history.  And the taxes raised to cover this expenditure may be the largest single act of taxation.   This taxation still continues today and will continue forever, since the maintenance and repair to keep this system in use will go on forever.  But if it had not been built, we could not be using it.
    Other things which had to occur were: 1. The development of the internet,  courtesy of the U.S Dept of Defense,  2. The development of geosynchronous communications satellites,  pioneered by the United States Army Signal Corp in the early 1960s,  along with the negotiation by our State Dept of numerous international treaties concerning the allocation and use of the frequencies involved, 3. The development of  cheap, small computers,  which needed, (first) the invention of the digital electronic computer itself,  first built  at Iowa State College in 1939 by Barry and Atanasoff, and paid for by state government, and (second) the "silicon chip," developed by NASA in the mid 60s.  (And of course the chip is merely an extension of the transistor, invented in 1948 by ATT/Bell Labs, which was then a government regulated monopoly.)
    Which of these things happened without massive government taxing,  spending, and regulation?    Private industry has always played a role, but that role in every case has been to wait until government had spent the major seed money to shepherd a new technology through the stages where there was no chance of making a profit---and then when it reached finally the stage where someone could make a buck--jump in and make that buck, and claim all the credit.  Private companies will pay for fine tuning an idea into something which they can sell.  But even today, only government will pay for ideas that will pay off forty years in the future.  Yet, forty years from now, we will surely need these things.  
   If an anti-government zealot who claims to be independent and self-sufficient lives in a log cabin in rural Idaho and hunts his own diner and wears buckskin shirts,  fine.   But if he wants a satellite link and a laptop,  give me a break!