Electronic computers. Lasers. Radar. Rockets. Satellites.
Might as well toss in railroads.
The early choo-choos would have gone nowhere without government land grants for right-of-way.
Let's take them one at a time:
Electronic computers: Alan Turing and his team developed the first electronic computer at Britain's Bletchley Park during WWII to decode German Enigma signals. So my caveat about the survival-skewed imperatives of wartime spending applies.
Incidentally, Turing et al. were decoding signals encoded by the lineal descendant of a machine invented by a private German company to preserve the security of commercial cables -- and Turing came up with the idea for his "bombe" in the Thirties, without a penny from the public purse having underwritten his thoughts. As a physicist, you surely know this.
Radar: Again, a wartime breakthrough, funded in the interests of national security to shoot down Huns before they could bomb England.
Rockets: Yet another wartime imperative. That's why the first serious rockets studied, tested and copied by the US were captured German V-2s.
Satellites: A direct outgrowth of the Cold War. In other words, a military exercise. Remember the panic over Sputnik 1? I'm just old enough to remember my parents being worried that the Rusians had seized the high ground of space. That was the threat that prompted the accelerated development of satellites by the U.S.
The common element in all these examples: In times of war, normal market forces are set aside in the interests of national survival. This is unfortunate but understandable. Where does govt. funbding of fusion to the tune of billions of dollars enter the equation? Why spend so much when, if the post is true, private researchers on small budgets are making splendid progress on their own, or at least with minimal govt. support.
But even granting your point, let's see where government's continuing involvement in your examples has led us.
Computers: Do you think, even for a moment, that the wonders of the Web -- FR most of all -- would be in place if government and bureaucrats had continued to dominate the development of cyber tech? The Internet grew expontentially in terms of users and tech once its development moved beyond govt.-funded DARPAnet, which was another defense-inspired undertaking by Uncle Sam.
. It was entrepreneurial instincts that gave us the Internet we enjoy today, not bureaucratic ones. If bureaucrats had remained in charge, I'd be writing this on a Remington Imperial typewriter, taking it to the Post Office and paying inordinate sums to have a civil-service clerk transcribe it for transmission, where the entire procedure would be repeated in reverse at the other end.
Rockets: Unlike computers, where private industry has become the mainspring of tech advances, NASA continues to dominate rocketry. The result: our Rube Goldberg space shuttle, a creature of pointless complexity, whose sole purpose is transporting cargo to the equally complex, expensive and baroque International Space Station.
In other words, NASA spends billions building an orbiting platform we don't need in order to have a destination for a shuttle we also don't need. That is absurdity squared.
Get Govt. out of space, let entrepreneurs in, and we might see the space hotels I read about in the science fiction books of my wide-eyed youth. Instead, when a billionaire wants to visit the space station (as happened last year), NASA does everything it can to keep him on the ground and, ironically, it is left to the Russians to take him aloft as a paying passenger.
Whatever govt. touches it ruins or distorts. As P.J. O'Roukre says, put the word "public" in front of anything and you have the difference between a public toilet and the bathroom in your home.
As a Freeper, you should know all this already. Or is it that you oppose govt. spending only until it applies to the laboratory in which YOU happen to work?
The sainted Gipper put it best: "Government IS the problem." Always