It’s a tired, tired debate: is government or business most responsible for this or that revolutionary technology? Industrial policy or markets: choose one, please. And thanks to Fortune magazine columnist Alan Sloan, we get to have this misframed argument of false choices yet again. Sloan mocks the idea that Amazon.com boss Jeff Bezos might be a libertarian. Smelling a potential lack of self awareness (at best) or hypocrisy (at worst) by Bezos, Sloan matter-of-factly notes that Amazon “after all, is based on the Internet, which was created during the Cold War by a military research-and-development arm of the federal government, the Advanced Research Projects Agency. No Arpanet, no Internet. No Internet, no Amazon, no $25 billion personal fortune for Jeff Bezos.” Sloan, shorter …. wait for it … “You didn’t build that, Bezos!” But Sloan’s simplistic, daisy-chain analysis doesn’t quite hold up. (My pal John Tamny calls the column a “hit piece.”) Robert Taylor, who ran ARPA in the 1960s before leaving to run Xerox’s famed PARC lab, put it this way: “The origins of the Internet include work both sponsored by the government and Xerox PARC, so you can’t say that the internet was invented by either one alone.” http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/08/you-didnt-build-that-does-amazons-jeff-bezos-really-owe-his-25-billion-fortune-to-uncle-sam/#mbl Tuesday, August 20, 2013
You didn’t build that: Does Amazon’s Jeff Bezos really owe his $25 billion fortune to Uncle Sam?
It’s a tired, tired debate: is government or business most responsible for this or that revolutionary technology? Industrial policy or markets: choose one, please. And thanks to Fortune magazine columnist Alan Sloan, we get to have this misframed argument of false choices yet again. Sloan mocks the idea that Amazon.com boss Jeff Bezos might be a libertarian. Smelling a potential lack of self awareness (at best) or hypocrisy (at worst) by Bezos, Sloan matter-of-factly notes that Amazon “after all, is based on the Internet, which was created during the Cold War by a military research-and-development arm of the federal government, the Advanced Research Projects Agency. No Arpanet, no Internet. No Internet, no Amazon, no $25 billion personal fortune for Jeff Bezos.” Sloan, shorter …. wait for it … “You didn’t build that, Bezos!” But Sloan’s simplistic, daisy-chain analysis doesn’t quite hold up. (My pal John Tamny calls the column a “hit piece.”) Robert Taylor, who ran ARPA in the 1960s before leaving to run Xerox’s famed PARC lab, put it this way: “The origins of the Internet include work both sponsored by the government and Xerox PARC, so you can’t say that the internet was invented by either one alone.” http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/08/you-didnt-build-that-does-amazons-jeff-bezos-really-owe-his-25-billion-fortune-to-uncle-sam/#mbl 