Tyson guts free market fundamentalism

Hi
Mott the Hoople said:
Un Huh...except he's right. He could have used the example of the Panama Canal or the Transcontinental railway or the Interstate Highway system or the Internet. Whether you like it or not he's spot on right. In every one of those infrastructure projects the free market was unwilling to take the risk.

If we left it to short sighted Libertarians and free market fundamentalist who lack imagination and an understanding of how the real world works we would have none of these important infrastructures and our markets would be a dismal fraction of what they currently are.
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How is the Internet a good example? Granted it was given an initial boost by DARPA but it was really Bell Labs giving away UNIX to universities for free and then Cusco unbundling
Mott the Hoople said:
Un Huh...except he's right. He could have used the example of the Panama Canal or the Transcontinental railway or the Interstate Highway system or the Internet. Whether you like it or not he's spot on right. In every one of those infrastructure projects the free market was unwilling to take the risk.

If we left it to short sighted Libertarians and free market fundamentalist who lack imagination and an understanding of how the real world works we would have none of these important infrastructures and our markets would be a dismal fraction of what they currently are.
Click to expand...

How is the Internet a good example? Granted it was given an initial boost by DARPA and CERN, courtesy of Tim Berners-Lee with HTML, but it was really Bell Labs giving away UNIX to universities for free and then Leonard Bosack stealing the Blue Box software from Stanford University and setting up Cisco that really got it going and allowed the peasants access to the Internet.

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Mott the Hoople said:
I was not saying or even implying that the public sector is superior or discrediting market capitalism. We need both to cooperate and coordinate in a robust and healthy manner to promote the common good. Extreme views like free market fundamentalism or command economics either simply don't work or are counterproductive and let's not even discuss unintelligible gibberish like Libertarianism that has never accomplished anything.
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To be fair Tyson built a little bit of a strawman for Gingrich and then used faulty examples as proof of his argument. You posted a video of Tyson (or half of it was Tyson) so what Tyson said is what matters here.

I also think that coordination between the public and private sector is inefficient and is a bad idea. They don't need to cooperate and get along, they function by very different rules.
 
Milagro said:
Hi
How is the Internet a good example? Granted it was given an initial boost by DARPA but it was really Bell Labs giving away UNIX to universities for free and then Cusco unbundling

How is the Internet a good example? Granted it was given an initial boost by DARPA but it was really Bell Labs giving away UNIX to universities for free and then Cusco unbundling

Sent from my Lenovo K52e78 using Tapatalk
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un huh and who created the original software, hardware and transmission technology that made all that possible?

Hell to this day internet transmission technology could not be sustained without substantial public investment.
 
Guille said:
To be fair Tyson built a little bit of a strawman for Gingrich and then used faulty examples as proof of his argument. You posted a video of Tyson (or half of it was Tyson) so what Tyson said is what matters here.

I also think that coordination between the public and private sector is inefficient and is a bad idea. They don't need to cooperate and get along, they function by very different rules.
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As someone who worked for several years at a major university working on technology transfer I would seriously have to disagree with you.
 
Mott the Hoople said:
un huh and who created the original software, hardware and transmission technology that made all that possible?

Hell to this day internet transmission technology could not be sustained without substantial public investment.
Click to expand...

I just said Mott, pay attention. In fact I forgot to mention BBN, who made the original switches for Darpanet. That network would have stayed resolutely within the scientific community and government without the likes of Cisco, Bell Labs, Berkeley and CERN. You also seem to be forgetting the Open Source community, do you think government could ever create Linux? Look what happened when they tried that with Ada the programming language, remember that?

I shouldn't have to tell you this surely?

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