Subsidies have always been about fostering new technologies and innovation.
- Electricity in rural homes: In the 1930s, private utilities often would not run power lines to rural areas because it was not profitable enough. The Rural Electrification Administration used federal loans to help local electric co-ops build out rural power infrastructure. Before that, only about 1 in 10 farms had electricity, while most urban homes already did. Today, obviously, electric service is a basic expectation almost everywhere.
- The internet: The internet’s roots trace back to ARPANET, a Defense Department/DARPA-funded research network created to connect computers and share digital resources. That publicly funded networking research laid the groundwork for the modern internet: email, web browsing, cloud apps, phones, business systems, and everything else that now runs daily life.
- GPS navigation: GPS was developed by the U.S. Department of Defense and remains a government-owned system. It was later opened for civilian use, which is why we now casually use it for maps, delivery routing, fleet tracking, aviation, farming, construction layout, timestamping financial systems, and finding the nearest pizza place.
- The Interstate Highway System: The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 created the Interstate Highway System as a massive federally backed infrastructure project. That public investment helped shape modern commuting, trucking, suburbia, logistics, road trips, distribution centers, and the way stores stock everyday goods.
- Microchips and semiconductors: Early integrated circuits were privately invented, but government demand from defense and space programs helped create the first major market. The U.S. military and NASA were early buyers of integrated circuits for missiles and space guidance systems, helping push the technology forward before it became cheap enough for consumer electronics. That helped lead to the chips in phones, cars, thermostats, routers, controllers, appliances, and BAS equipment.
- Phone cameras and digital imaging: Modern phone cameras owe a lot to NASA/JPL work on CMOS image sensors. NASA describes the CMOS image sensor as one of its most widespread spinoff technologies, enabling cell phone cameras, HD video, and modern digital imaging.
- Medical research and everyday medicine: A lot of drugs, vaccines, diagnostics, and medical knowledge start with publicly funded basic research before private companies commercialize the final products. NIH describes itself as the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research and says decades of NIH-funded work have driven advances in health and science.
The government absorbs early risk, funds infrastructure or basic research, creates a first market, and then private industry scales it into something ordinary people use every day.
Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus 23 hours ago
Cool, lets remove all subsidies from fossil fuel and nuclear power generation, including making them clean up their pollution instead of externalizing those costs, and lets see how well that goes.
GoatSynagogue@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
Yeah, they should. I’m all for that.
Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus 20 hours ago
They only need subsidies because the costs of fossil fuels get externalized. If every fossil fuel company had to sequester all the CO2 they just dump into the atmosphere, they would probably go bankrupt.