Apple has the moral high ground, and that ground is higher the less taxes they pay.
Remember military spending is far more than roads.
And without military conflict over the last 1 million years, human evolution would not be something to be admired. But when we have in front of us the longest military conflict in US history being against loosely organized foot soldiers living in tents, something is clearly wrong.
If we look at how great thinkers had to tease out right answers from wrong--Tesla for example had a lot of wrong ideas and bad experiments, but eventually he came across brilliance.
The benefits we see here from military conflict all came from real competition, and the troubles we can see here come from a consolidation of power under a global plutocracy that is consolidating power across the globe.
Military invented expensive microwave radar. Free markets turned it into $100 kitchen appliances.
The government put satellites on orbit at tremendous cost for military positioning system. Free markets put Waze driving directions on my phone.
Yes, we have a bunch of expensive things due to government spending. Imagine how many more we would've had and how much cheaper if free markets were allowed to create them...
Jet engines? Governments refused to fund jet engine development until they were confronted with FLYING jet aircraft. This happened in both England and Germany. The US government ordered Lockheed to stop working on jet engines and concentrate on piston engines.
I've just unearthed my copy of The Matrix, John S. Quarterman's exploration of "computer networks and conferencing systems worldwide". It was published in 1990, just on the cusp of the breakout of the Internet (there's a late 1990s revised edition I've not seen).
It covers a lot of ground. Not of much practical use at this point, but a phenomenal historical document: Layers & protocols, management protocols, administration. And the networks!
AQ, HEPnet, PHYSNET, BITNET, USENET, UUCP, FidoNet, Ean, VNETT, XEROX Internet, EASYnet, Tandem, HP Internet, UUNET, DASnet, CUNYVM, CERN, EUnet, FNET, ARISTOTE, SMARTIX, REUNIR, Minitel, Dnet, DFN, AGFNET, BELWU, ARIADNE, HEANET, INFNET, SURFnet, Enet, JANET, UKnet, GreeNet, COSMOS, NORDUnet, DENet, DKnet, ....
(Nothing about WWW or Gopher though. Al Gore is mentioned.)
On the one hand, one network would have had to emerge. But on the other, why the Internet?
Those computers developed from the code-breaking machinery in WW2 you mean?
Militars have that awful economic drag building expensive things just to blow them in some far away place without any return.
But they didn't. As the old saying goes, the Swiss had peace for 500 years and all they invented was the cuckoo clock.
