The right-wingers would love to have you think that it was the markets that gave you all of the advances in technology that we have enjoyed over the last 50 years. But a new report from the Longview Institute completely debunks that notion. In fact, it was government programs and government funding that led to all the advances that make Bill Gates and his people happy.
Bill Gates:
With research support from the Army, Navy, and Air Force, Ivan Sutherland of MIT, made what was arguably the seminal breakthrough in the development of HCI. He created in 1962 a program called Sketchpad which was the first to use a monitor and a mouse-like pointing device. Sutherland became director of the Information Technology project at the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). He provided funding to establish the computer science departments at Stanford, Carnegie-Mellon, Utah and MIT, and he pushed them to develop the work he had begun with Sketchpad.
The principles behind the laser came from a theory of Einstein’s, but its story, like many other post-war inventions, began with the military. In 1948, the Pentagon provided Columbia University with the funds to hire a new team of physicists and directed them to work on microwave radar technology. One of the physicists hired was Charles Townes. Three years later, Townes completed work on what he called a maser (Microwave Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation).
These discoveries would lead to the invention of the laser.
While U.S. chipmakers produced incremental improvements in size and speed, the Japanese government spent hundreds of millions of dollars on entirely new chip designs, so that by the mid-1980’s, Japanese companies captured the majority of the market and the U.S. industry seemed to be on its way out. The U.S. government responded with three initiatives. The first two, the Very High Speed Integrated Circuit (VHSIC) program and Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI), were funded by the Department of Defense and DARPA respectively, and helped U.S. companies catch up to Japanese technology. The third, Sematech, represented one of the most successful government-industry collaborations. With joint funding from ARPA and many leading chipmakers, Sematech advanced U.S. chipmakers past Japanese competition and saved a $150 billion dollar industry. Both the private sector and the government contributed to the development of the microchip, but the continued existence of a U.S. industry owes a great debt to the federal government.
And no less an apostle of Small Government than Ronald Reagan was the President at that time; it is really interesting how Reagan didn’t believe his own rhetoric about government being the problem. And the charming fellows at Red State and Free Republic have Ronald Reagan to thank for the ability to get on the Internet and spew their right-wing garbage in their spare time.
The idea for the Internet, like the personal computer, came from the heads of the information technology department of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), J.C.R. Licklider and Robert Taylor. The actual mechanism, however, was conceived of by a researcher at RAND, the think tank of the U.S. Army. Paul Baran imagined an alternative to the phone network in which, instead of a central switchboard routing callers to their destinations, each user would be connected to its neighbors and they to theirs, forming a decentralized network. RAND pitched the idea to the Air Force, which then asked AT&T to build the network. AT&T, however, refused to build it because they did not want to share the circuit maps the network would require. This was only the first instance where a private firm hindered the Internet’s development because the new technology threatened its existing business.
Once again, right-wingers are the beneficiary of the very thing they say they are against — Big Government.
Government support for MRI began with its predecessor technology, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, a tool used to determine the composition and structure of matter. NMR spectroscopy uses almost the same technique as MRI; a machine produces a magnetic field around an object and aims radio waves at a particular location on the object. The magnetic field causes the nuclei of certain atoms in the object to move in the direction of the field, and the radio waves cause those nuclei to revolve at a certain frequency. By measuring that frequency and the time the nuclei take to return to normal when the magnetic field is turned off, scientists can determine the type and location of the atoms in the object.
Over the course of its development, scientists working on NMR spectroscopy received $90 million in grants from the National Science Foundation, the government’s fund for scientific research. But, with the successful commercialization of the technology by the 1960’s, the government and university researchers turned their attentions to its possible applications. Raymond Damadian, a scientist at the State University of New York (SUNY) Medical Center, was the first to use NMR for medical purposes. He began by examining a cancerous rat using the technique and soon discovered that diseased cells produced different readings than healthy cells, allowing him to detect cancer without an invasive procedure.
So, once again, the right-wingers have Big Government to thank for living their comfortable lifestyle, which allows them to spend thousands of dollars to keep themselves cancer-free.
Taxol is a complex compound found in the bark of the Pacific yew tree. The bark was first collected in 1962 and its potential for killing cells was demonstrated in 1964 as part of the National Cancer Institute (NCI)-United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) plant screening program. In 1971, chemists at the Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina, a nonprofit research organization created in 1958 by leaders in academia, business and government, first isolated the compound. The NCI selected Taxol as a development candidate in 1977 and clinical trials began in 1984. The yew bark was supplied by the Natural Products Branch of the NCI, sourced from trees located on National Forest lands. In 1989, the Johns Hopkins University Oncology Group reported that Taxol produced a very high response rate in women with ovarian cancer whose cancer had been unresponsive to other chemotherapeutic agents.
So, the notion that the Free Markets are reponsible for all the advances in science and technology in the last 50 years has been debunked. And it is really interesting to observe the self-loathing of right-wingers and their political opportunism. Clarence Thomas, for instance, grew up benefiting from affirmative action and now works to undermine the very programs that got him where he is today. There are plenty of homophobic Republican politicians and religious leaders who are secretly gay themselves.
And this is yet another example — Republicans benefiting from the very programs that they say they are against.
The fact of the matter is that we all have a mutual responsibility to make this a better place to live. The more resources one has, the more one has to better the lives of those less fortunate than us. Thus, Bill Gates has much more of a responsibility to make lives better for others than you or I would, although we must do our part. But since the government has the most resources of anyone and since the government is the representative of people, the government has the most responsibility to provide for the well-being of others.