I disagree with that statement. People created internet. As well as built roads and educated children. Individuals do that. The only question is, how are they financed. If those activities are financed using tax money, it's called "government". Then, the question we should ask ourselves, would people still invent awesome things and build roads and educate their children without government funding? Would they, maybe, somehow use the money they don't have to pay as taxes now, to do all of those things?
After all, they use money to do other things all the time, and those other things are not nearly as important for them as roads or education.
> If those activities are financed using tax money, it's called "government".
Taxes don't finance US government expenditure; they create demand for the currency.
> Then, the question we should ask ourselves, would people still invent awesome things and build roads and educate their children without government funding
Government provides the coordination required to accomplish these things. The private sector is notoriously horrible at coordination between competing actors.
> The private sector is notoriously horrible at coordination between competing actors.
This must be why I can never get my luggage handled flying two or more airlines or why I can never use my cellphone in another country connecting to another operator's network. Can you give me some examples where the private sector is actually bad at coordination?
You picked two areas with massive government regulation. So yes, when government acts as the intermediary, the private sector can stop failing at coordination.
Well, you're not exactly correct. Airlines are indeed regulated, but not as much as they were before in the 1970s. After the deregulation of the Airline industry the prices dropped, and service levels increased.
Telecomm, again, is only heavily regulated in the US. In my country it isn't, yet we do enjoy rather low prices and quite a nice service overall. Telecom operators also cooperate without any government intervention: at some point they realized it'd be great to have incoming calls from ALL operators free (they weren't before) and outgoing calls to be of the same price for any phone (they weren't).
