It's easy to refute; see that word "Every" at the front of the sentence? All I need to do is point to one counter-example invention that didn't include Govt R&D. I'll pick radio. Q.E. Fuckin' D.
But if we treat the statement as a generalization, and not a supposition, I'll refute it with other generalizations.
The biggest one is that government, as an entity, had no involvement in R&D until the last few decades.
Really? Yeah. Government was positively tiny during the industrial revolution. In today's world it is hard to imagine *anything* happening without government involvement. But that was not always the case! Let's go to the chart:
This chart presents government spending as a percentage of GDP. This explains why Edison didn't get any government grants. Alexander Graham Bell, no fed funding. Henry Ford? You know the answer.
Even by the 50s, government involvement in R&D was so unlikely that the March of Dimes was actually founded by FDR, but remained
100% privately funded as it solved the problem of Polio. Not one of those dimes came from government. They came from people giving dimes. That's just how it was.
"B-b-but the Internet!" ...which sat around not doing much for decades, until it opened to private interests, at which time it blossomed with the light of a thousand suns. Google get government funding? They did not, and the privately-educated Montessori kids who invented it are in the process of fighting government involvement tooth and nail.
Can the government innovate? In the late 70s and 80s it founded the Department of Energy, and was suddenly spending big bucks funding alternative fuels, in the search to replace gasoline. How'd that go? Well two generations later, we've replaced 10% of gas with a more expensive alternative in order to get political support from the farmers. Good goin'!
I do love how two of your examples are providing a competitive advantage/monopoly to certain private companies. Way to go government! Oh sure, the computer industry would have been a flop without these "de facto subsidies" to IBM!
