I'm reminded of In-Q-Tel at times like these. I defy anyone to find more than 20% of wildly successful "tech giants" who have not received government funding and support. It's not a free market when some get tax breaks and government money. If you get those things, your utmost law should be the law that governs the government in your region. This will never happen, of course.
What does IQT have to do with any of this? I get where you are coming from and to a certain extent agree with the principal. The problem is that the us government is a giant beast of an organization and can't be thought of as a single entity.
In FY19 the us government spent 4.5 trillion dollars.
To put that in perspective (these are the top 5 companies in the world by market cap and some quick googling): Saudi Aramco spent 150 Billion, Apple spent about 200 Billion, Microsoft was 82 Billion, Amazon spent 265 Billion and Google spent 127 Billion.
Combined the top 5 companies in the world spent less in an entire year than the US government spent in a single quarter (824B/year vs. 1,125B).
There is so much spend that it is difficult to have a company that in some way doesn't either directly do business with the USG or benefit within 1 degree of separation from USG spending.
The utilization of government assistance is the utilization of force and violence. If a small number of players do this, it is not a free market, was my main point. If there is a way to utilize government, it should come with the strings attached by which the government itself is nominally controlled (granted, the government itself ignores those strings, but it would be a step in the right direction, imo).
I'm reminded of In-Q-Tel at times like these. I defy anyone to find more than 20% of wildly successful "tech giants" who have not received government funding and support. It's not a free market when some get tax breaks and government money. If you get those things, your utmost law should be the law that governs the government in your region. This will never happen, of course.