Comment by jonnathanson

Intel has been a phenomenal success story without major government assistance (that I know of, at least). But I guarantee that the government would bail it out if it ever fell on hard times. We seem to be entering a new era of international protectionism, and I suspect that more subsidies, protections, and tariffs are on the way.

Whether government investment or assistance is necessary for deep technological R&D is a really interesting question. A preponderance of our hardware (and many of our software) advances, even in the private sector, were built on the back of major government R&D investment. As you've pointed out, a lot of this has come from the military-industrial complex.

Our major companies (other than Goldman Sachs and its peers) don't receive the same level of protection that the Korean chaebol, or the Japanese Big Four, or the Chinese or even French conglomerates do. But that may change in the near to distant future. It will depend upon our domestic firms' abilities to compete on an international playing field that is increasingly turning toward the chaebol model, and not so much the free-market model.