The Internet evolved from Arpanet, a network established by DARPA. Given that was created by a government agency, and therefore funded by the same taxes companies are trying to avoid, I'd argue that it's a great example for why companies should indeed follow their civic duties and pay their taxes.

It's also worth pointing out that many of those "wonderful things" had to be regulated by governments due to how bad their business practices and environmental effects are when pursuing making money. Sure, we have cars, but that's coming from the same industry that brought us leaded fuel and global warming.

I’m pretty sure he was being sarcastic. Nobody’s that jejune.

I'm afraid he's not (that was pretty much Milton Friedman's position as well as all of his UChicago fellow, which is the reason why we're back to the gilded age with robber barons all around)

I actually read the book "The Robber Barons". The author's conclusions do not match the facts he presents.

Not familiar with any particular book called that way.

The “Robber barons” is a phrase that have been used since the late 19th century, and the fact that the American economy had become toxically concentrated in the hands of a few back then really isn't something contentious.

> Nobody’s that jejune.

Edit out swipes like this from comments on HN please, no matter what you're referring to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't think there's a way for me to edit old posts, but I swear and/or affirm I will not feed the trolls moving forward.

I think this is also a swipe isn't it?

I'm not sure I'm seeing what you see (but then, you stare into the mod abyss)

It seems to characterize WalterBright as a troll.

Recent comment history supports this characterization (44849578 44849563 44849504 44847469)

Those comments seem to me to be a combination of Dad jokes and “home truths” from someone who has lived long enough, witnessed enough, and whose career achievements are objectively impressive enough, that their perspective should be at least a little food for thought.

Of the “home truths”, of course people can disagree and debate them, but we should ask ourselves what we know that they don't know before dismissing them out of hand.

All that aside, we still don't call people we disagree with trolls on HN; that's a term reserved for consistently-bad actors who should be banned.

The internet evolved from the telegraphy network, which was not created by the government.

Besides, I've listed several times a number of other networks that sprang up. If it wasn't Arpanet, one of the others would have become dominant. The reason is simple - anyone with two or more computers tried to connect them together. The notion that we'd still not have any interconnections between them if it wasn't for Arpanet is just silly.

As for bad environmental effects, socialism has a much worse track record. Free markets produce enough surplus that costly mitigations become practical.

> The internet evolved from the telegraphy network, which was not created by the government.

Claining that the internet evolved from telegraph is very much bad faith, but the worse part about this argument is that it's wrong: the first country-scale telegraph network was indeed funded by the French government[1].

> As for bad environmental effects, socialism has a much worse track record

Why are you guys obsessed so much with socialism? There is no mention of socialism anywhere in this thread. Government funding stuff has nothing to do with socialism in the first place, otherwise it would mean that every developed country is a socialist one, with the only non-socialist countries being failed states like Somalia which really isn't the argument you want to make.

> Free markets produce enough surplus that costly mitigations become practical.

“Free market” doesn't exist, it's a propaganda phrase with no basis on reality. The government always and everywhere has a key role to play in the economy, by counteracting all kinds of negative outcomes that arise from markets (mitigating crashes or maintaining consumer trust through regulations to name a few).

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chappe_telegraph