* More accurate to say "governments are more innovative than corporations."

* Governments employ workers for wages, like corporations. For example, innovative mathematician Terence Tao is employed at UCLA, a public university. (Which paid him $433,599.99 in 2012. http://www.sacbee.com/statepay/)

* Corporations are artificial creations of the state. Feel free to look at their history. Government and corporate interests are the same, to a first approximation. They're both part of the same (state-capitalist) system.

BTW, the point is obviously her book contains relevant evidence.

Nonsense. If that were true, then government wouldn't contract so much of their "innovation" out to corporations. I used to work for a corporation that did a lot of this "government innovation", and the primary role of government was to figure out which corporation would do the innovating, make sure it got done, and then to pay them.

Our biggest competitors were other corporations. Yes, we had some competition from government labs, but not much. We and our corporate competitors could create whole new staffed divisions in a half-dozen promising areas in the time it took a government lab to argue over whether to use this year's budget on a new framatron or a pizza oven.

We also had some competition from research universities, but even there, the public universities were hardly more "innovative" than MIT, Caltech, Stanford...the private corporations.

Some of the things we came up with at taxpayer expense were worthless. What could taxpayers have come up with if their money hadn't been confiscated and given to us? Some of the things were valuable (I think), but nothing that we couldn't have produced if paid by companies (as we often were) instead of a government agency.

And all this stuff about how we owe the Internet to government is hooey. It's as if packet switching could only have been invented by someone paid with confiscated tax dollars. People who were paid by non-coerced customer revenues could never have thought of it, and if the government hadn't invented it, it wouldn't exist today.

Just because the government had its fingers in something doesn't mean it played a necessary role. It tends to stick its fingers into nearly everything, but that doesn't mean it plays a useful role in more than a few of them. Most of those innovations where the government was first to do something would have been done just as well not long after by someone else if the demand for it were real (people voluntarily spending their own money) and not just political.

Way to read your own ideologies into my simple statement. It's unnecessarily arrogant to think you can glean so much from a two-sentence remark on your attempt to belittle state-based innovation and oversimplification of reasons behind contracting corporations for state needs. Nothing in my simple statement precluded recognition of economic complexities or suggested the state was in charge.

We can disagree all day long, and you can go about your business suggesting the state is a monstrous oaf stealing money from people with jack-booted thugs, giving it away to get votes, and the persons from whom they stole the cash got absolutely nothing out of the 'theft'--but piss off with this patronizing bullshit of calling a different view that of a child.

You've heavily laden a ridiculously partisan view of economy with a ridiculously partisan view of the state, and ultimately say nothing helpful or enlightening.

For someone who allegedly sits so high above, fathoming complex adaptive systems, you sure relegate the state to a role of simplicity and hand-waving, touting garbage as incontrovertible truths.

The state takes everyone's money by force without trading anything for it? What a useless view that shows no comprehension of political theory and the complex adaptive systems we establish in social and political institutions as actors who engage and transact.

The ability to make a book in service of own's argument is evidence of a great deal many things: at the very least, dedication and conviction to one's argument.

The space race was about international posturing and displays of technological capability as a deterrent to engaging in nuclear war.

This is 100% valid, and yet it resulted in us putting a man on the moon, so you haven't really detracted from the argument.

Or confidence in one's ability to fool the market.

As we human beings live in a complex system such as country. The old fashioned "long term planning and executing accordingly" in the long run actually does way more harm. Misallocating resources, killing the possibilities each individual could bring to the system, killing the necessary environment for more diversified individuals to grow up from infants... If taking the similarity to animals' as a spectrum (no offense). A low level trait means things like food needs, shelter to live. A high level trait means the things people created such as art, tech... What I believe may be wrong, but I think as humans, the high level traits are the ultimate things we are looking for. Bringing in more possibilities and catalyze some of them might be a good way.

As a side effect we got positioning, communications and earth observing satellites, all the sciences have had massive benefits and the extra research into stuff like photovoltaics hasn't hurt either.

You're right about funding being coerced from citizens. There is also nothing theoretical about it, as anyone who has dealt with the IRS can probably tell you.

As to long scale planning certainly being a strength of a government, I offer you the national debt of the United States of America as evidence. The long scale planning done by politicians has the national debt, including unfunded liabilities, at something like 80 trillion dollars or more.