Again, the taxpayers paid for these developments–but Americans have been repaid a hundredfold by these innovations.

Because investment is NOT a zero-sum game. No matter who the investor is, the return on investment (if it’s the right investment) can exceed the cost by a wide margin.

You could ask the same thing about the great entrepreneurs: Marconi, Ford, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, all needed financing and/or venture capital to get started. You could ask the same question: How does funding any of them from “the same bucket of water” produce a net benefit, when that’s money that had to come from elsewhere? The answer is that you were funding their innovations, which in the long run benefited far more than they cost.

What I think often gets forgotten is that the Government can innovate too. Not often.

But I can think of innovations in which the Government played a major role:

Interchangeable parts (Army contracts for mass-produced rifles in the early 19th century)

Settling the West (the Indian Wars, the Transcontinental Railroad)

RCA, the Radio Corporation of America (Started up by the Navy to get a homegrown supplier of radios)

The Panama Canal

LORAN navigation

Radar

Nuclear power

The Interstate highway system

Space satellites

Jet aircraft

The Internet (commercialized from the Pentagon’s ARPANET survivable network)

Don’t you agree that the benefits to America from each one of these far exceeded the cost to the taxpayer to pay for it?

While it’s politically incorrect, let’s face it: The white settlers (and newly freed blacks) who took Greeley’s advice and went West, developed the West to a much greater degree than the AmerIndians did. These settlers generated huge amounts of wealth from gold prospecting, farming, ranching, etc. Which ended up enriching all those other folks back East. But to do that, the U.S. Army had to get rid of the Indians first. And the Federal Government had to fund the building of the Transcontinental Railroad. All that came from taxpayer dollars.

“that’s great. i’m done with you. you’re boring”

……aaahhh…..no I’m not or you wouldn’t have spent so much time fencing with me…..I linked to your site btw and assume you are the Willyp listed amongst the officers who posted a number of enlightening posts of which I read a few …..if I may say so you need to let some sunlight in at ny young republican central…..why not ask Bruce Bartlett to speak at one of your events…..ho.ho.ho.ho

“otto, you never answer a question. you defer to authority.”

………Willy dear boy……I’m not going to argue about whether the earth is flat………I’m satisfied with the body of authorative evidence that says it isn’t….ok

……..Willy……I don’t have an economics degree and since you didn’t reply in the affirmative I assume you don’t either……however, I have grad and masters degrees that contained economic components (most of the stuff I’ve forgotten to be honest)…….I’m certainly not a monetary expert but I know enough to get by and in broad terms I was a monetarist before you were born probably ……I’ve also had a lifetime of experience managing businesses in all sorts of economic environments…….believing in some aspects of monetarism, creative destruction, et al from the “Austrian” school is NOT incompatible with belief in mainstream Keynesian economics……you take a way too simplistic and absolutist a view which ignores reality and leads you into crankish denial of well proven theorems and events……I am not however a gold-bug (whose importance in modern monetary management you consistently overstate….Trichet doesn’t spend much time thinking about the price of gold)…….you are welcome to your beliefs but they are not material in any practical sense and I advise you not to make them the basis of an investment strategy……it’s as easy to lose money investing in gold as it is in equities or corporate debt

You do not understand the concept of money, and it really that simple.

“The multiplier effect is ludicrous”

……..Well I suppose it would be to someone who denies the existence of other well known economic phenomena like deflationary spirals, or the expansionary effect of public finance during WW 1 and 2 ………and you have obtained an economics degree during which a Canadian central banker denied the existence of defs, economic multipliers and the expansionary effect of wartime US public spending……if true, which I rather doubt, hopefully he’s a former Canadian central banker

The multiplier effect is ludicrous. Which is why I ask you to explain it to me in your own words, so perhaps you can realize that you don’t fully understand it. Indeed, it’s incomprehensible.