You, Rocko, wrote:

>I think you miss the more general point.
No, you miss my point. The startup costs for computer R&D were
prohibitive without state intervention. Who was going to pay for ENIAC
besides the Pentagon? Hence the choice: either state intervention and
high-tech, or no state intervention and no high-tech. That the decision
was made without public involvement I am not defending; I am asserting
that if the public had been invited to decide, the decision would have
been the same (especially if the outcome were known): subsidize the R&D.

I anticipate someone saying 1) because we subsidized it, we should get
some sort of reduced price on the outcome or 2) the whole shebang should
have been 100% a public enterprise from the start. As to 1), aside from
the difficulty in ascertaining what the price should be, the answer is:
we already do. I have no idea what you mean by "inflated prices" for
computers. Computers are dirt cheap and getting cheaper. Profit margins
for hardware mfrs are nothing to brag about, as the marginal costs of
producing additional chips approaches the vanishing point and competition
drives the price to zero.

Also, when was anything "turned over" to private hands? As far as I know,
the technology was invented by private companies working under contract
with the government. To extend your analogy, if I employ a photographer
to take my picture, the negative doesn't become my property. It remains
with the photographer to do with as he wishes. Only the picture is yours.
If I don't like that arrangement, I am free to take my own picture. If I
am wrong, please tell me what technology was turned over to private hands
and under what terms. (For contemporary examples of the kind of larcenous
giveaways that I DO object to, see US Forest Service policy re logging on
public lands and the recent FCC giveaway of the broadcast spectrum to the
media oligopolies.)

Besides, when you buy a computer today, a chunk of that purchase price
goes into the company's R&D, which produces an even cheaper computer
model later, making currently owned ones worth about as much as
paperweight. Yet no one argues that that should entitle current computer
owners to the later models at a submarket price. Public investment in
early computer research is analogous, as far as I'm concerned. Or would
you require computer hardware mfrs to operate at a loss?

As to 2), bought many Soviet computers lately?