Government Innovation Funding

We will never know the opposite wont we? It is not that state is not capable of investment on innovation. They are just terrible at it. There are many rebuttals on the issue of "government is necessary for innovation". Here is one of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbR4cjA-Few

pretty much every piece of tech you mentioned had decades of government investment. Maybe what makes those places possible is government policy. Not many governments are as rich as USA.

Various reasons - capitalism, the degraded ability of bureaucracies to manage things compared to agile private enterprises as technology improves, conflicts of interest between nation states, and so forth. Government is not a great mechanism to drive innovation by itself, especially cooperative multi-state efforts. Things are better managed by governments setting good rules in place and private sector entities doing whatever they can to profit within the bounds of those rules.

If gov incentivised creating new companies that would not be a problem, I guess ?

Your second claim has a simple counter-argument: the government has allocated wealth so well in the past 100 years that they are responsible for some major tech innovations (nasa, CERN, every startup that began in a public college) and subsidise private industries that would die without them (Starlink, The corn industry).

In a Western market economy, we encourage the outcomes we want through regulation and policy. For example the High Tech industry is propped up in the US through fat government contracts for defense related companies (eg Palantir, Google), strategic venture funds (CIA's In-Q-Tel), government innovation efforts that are given away (Darpa, Arpanet), government funding to universities to teach certain course or research certain fields. Since farming, manufacturing, infrastructure and energy co

There are things that Gov spending can help with foundational technologies - multi-decade research that would otherwise VCs impatient and create a complete breakdown of private enterprise. There are areas of engineering where Gov involvement creates asymmetry for big companies and screw the small guy - in turn creating inefficient private enterprise, thus fostering giant monopolies or quasi-monopolies. There is nuance which is missing in the discussion on HN perhaps due to political team sport.

Nobody would have funded many bad ideas. That's when you turn to government to do it.

Just because some (often already rich) people are capable to funnel some of the money out of governments, it doesn't mean that governments are supporting innovation.This mechanisms just enable more government corruption and shady deals done by people who acquired power in the government.I think VC and private investors are a much healthier mechanism than stealing money with taxes under the threat of violence (of which the government holds the legal monopoly) and then redistributing it

Well, sometimes the country can't just put its trust into private investors to really accomplish something in innovation. There is already a lot of money sleeping, sometimes off shore, so I don't think it's really relevant to judge this aspect.It's the nature of current capitalism and how big players just won't even try going towards the electric car because it's a risk for their business model. If you want to go forward, sometimes you have to force your hand, an