My more top level view is that DARPA and such are just side channels to sneakily funnel public money into research.
In theory free market should take care of the economy. It's really good at optimizing manufacturing processes and getting stuff as cheaply as possible into hands of as many people as possible.
However there's one thing essential to the economy that free market sucks at. It's research. And that's not because companies are bad at doing research. It's because companies are bad at funding research. Research is inherently risky and no sane capitalist will invest in anything beyond tinker level research because he will loose. And he's not supposed to loose.
In theory you could fund research overtly with country budget, but no one is going to support that. Why spend money on eggheads playing with useless stuff if people are hungry and streets are dirty?
What nobody opposes is giving more money to the military. And what anyone can't oppose is military spending money in whichever way they please. So they can spend it on research. Most will be wasted, very few will have actual military potential. The rest can be graciously dumped into the economy for companies to tinker, optimize making of, manufacture, market and sell.
IMHO military is the core of USA success (or even success of global capitalism), not through might, but through ability to get plenty of public money and ability to allocate it into things that would never get funded in any other way.
In theory free market should take care of the economy. It's really good at optimizing manufacturing processes and getting stuff as cheaply as possible into hands of as many people as possible.
However there's one thing essential to the economy that free market sucks at. It's research. And that's not because companies are bad at doing research. It's because companies are bad at funding research. Research is inherently risky and no sane capitalist will invest in anything beyond tinker level research because he will loose. And he's not supposed to loose.
In theory you could fund research overtly with country budget, but no one is going to support that. Why spend money on eggheads playing with useless stuff if people are hungry and streets are dirty?
What nobody opposes is giving more money to the military. And what anyone can't oppose is military spending money in whichever way they please. So they can spend it on research. Most will be wasted, very few will have actual military potential. The rest can be graciously dumped into the economy for companies to tinker, optimize making of, manufacture, market and sell.
IMHO military is the core of USA success (or even success of global capitalism), not through might, but through ability to get plenty of public money and ability to allocate it into things that would never get funded in any other way.