> 20% of Norway's GDP gets pumped out of the ground. The US does not have that luxury.
Wrong again, the Nordics do not rely on oil to fund their welfare states - not even Norway.
> To hand it all to the government is confirmation bias.
Your whole comment screams confirmation bias for your own ideological view. Drawing a clean dividing line between "government" and "markets" is of course a fool's errand because they aren't separate - governments create markets through enforcement of property law and many other laws and programs.
Re:Adam Smith and Inequality (2014)
by WalterBright on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @01:38AM
(#28520656)
> Wrong again, the Nordics do not rely on oil to fund their welfare states - not even Norway.
It's still part of the reported GDP.
> governments create markets through enforcement of property law and many other laws and programs.
If you're familiar with my posts, I often write that the purpose of government is to protect property rights so free markets can function.
> the state played a pivotal role in space and phone technology.
There wouldn't be phones we have today without Apple. There was no government program to create them. Apple invested billions of investor money in creating them.
I've seen books like the one you cite before. Their central theme is if a technology is based on ABCDEF, and the government did only C, then government gets all the credit. If the government did only A, then the government gets all the credit. If the government did F, then the government gets all the credit.
For example, Samuel Morse invented digital telecommunications. But of course, the government gets all the credit for making an improvement on it.
But if the government does deserve the credit for the technology stack that makes for a successful phone, why didn't any communist country make a phone?
The article claims the government invented touch screen technology. I don't know how true that is, but it omits that the GUI, an essential technology for the phone, came from Xerox, not the government.
P.S. The history of the touch screen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen is long and complicated. To hand it all to the government is confirmation bias.