Originally Posted by sperbonzo

The healthcare system was not invented by government, it was invented by private people working as doctors and nurses. The Telephone system was not invented by government, it was invented by private business. The power grid was not built by government, it was built by private business. The Education system was not built by government, it was built by private teachers and people banding together to build a school for their communities. The original road system was all built by private companies and local people. The technology that that ARPA was based on was developed by IBM and Rand.

The government later came and took over or heavily regulated all of these things, but that does NOT mean that they were provided to us by government in the first place.

If government had taken over car production 100 years ago, we would all still be driving Model T's and people would be saying "Who would build cars if it wasn't for government?".

In fact, with the collapse of the Soviet Block in Eastern Europe, hard line party members were predicting dire consequences for a system where the government did not control the system of product distribution. Without central planning to run things, they warned, then how would people know how many toothbrushes to send to this city or that? In fact, of course, private enterprise does a FAR better and FAR more efficient job of distribution than any government system.

I could go on and on about the massive number of examples of this, but no point I guess.

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