Without the State, Who Would Invent Tang?

By Peter Klein

During the 2012 presidential campaign, President Obama made his now famous claim that “you didn’t build that” in reference to the infrastructure that businesses use to provide goods and services to customers. These comments were controversial, but Obama’s defenders quickly noted that Obama was not criticizing business owners, merely highlighting the supposedly indispensable role governments play in providing amenities on which businesses rely for success: “Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government 

research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.”


This view is shared by almost all mainstream social scientists, even those who are generally favorable toward
free markets and limited government. Sure, they will say, the market is good at producing shoes or trucks or laptop computers, but the market cannot provide basic research—it is a “public good” that only government can provide.


A general critique of the public-goods rationale for government science funding will have to wait for another
day. But here I want to address a companion argument that is often used to justify not only expansive government per se, but a large military sector specifically. It’s the argument that war is an important, and even necessary, source of scientific progress, because technologies developed by the state to fight wars often have important civilian uses. Innovation is a side benefit of war, say war’s defenders. By mobilizing all the resources of society, through coercion, repression, and exploitation, we get not only civic pride and the martial spirit, but also great new technologies.

You can view the rest of the article here in the Mises Institute's March issue of The Free Market