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- Think about the list of areas in which the U.S. has technological leadership. Almost all of them were financed at least in the beginning (and a lot of them in the mature stage) by the U.S. government. Basically, the Pentagon financed the development of the computer in the early days, and the Internet also came out of a Pentagon research project.
The semiconductor -- the foundation of the information economy -- was initially developed with by the funding of the U.S. Navy. The U.S. aircraft industry would not have become what it is today had the U.S. Air Force not massively subsidized it indirectly by paying huge prices for its military aircraft, the profit of which was channelled into developing civilian aircraft. Despite what the pharmaceutical lobby might say, 30 percent of pharmaceutical research in the United States is provided by the federal government. The list is quite impressive.