From Esther Dyson, useful commentary on the relative roles of the public and private sectors in fostering new industries:
It is this free-market economy, which rewards useful innovation and purposeful risk-taking, that we should honor and recognize. The U.S. government (or European governments, for that matter) can't get us out of our current economic mess any better than they can get us to the moon at this point. In most areas of endeavor, the government should be a demanding customer rather than a provider (or subsidizer).
In the United States, government fostered the airline business—largely by buying cargo services from private airlines. It also built what became the Internet—and then sensibly left most of the development and day-to-day operations to the private sector.
