The latest screams from those who hate government (yet work in government) came during the bungled rollout of the Affordable Care Act. The public sector is incapable of doing such things correctly, they said, only private business can execute such projects correctly. Except…having worked for some free-market companies, I can tell you that new Internet platforms and offerings are a mess initially (and sometimes permanently) more often than not. The Obamacare site, fixed fairly quickly, did a better job than many private concerns would have.

The idea that government is incompetent and the free market is perfect is a tired and false argument. Either can be good or bad. The Internet was birthed by the government and only when developed was it able to survive and thrive on venture capital. DARPA regularly churns out amazingly creative inventions (though they often give me nightmares). And let’s recall that Mitt Romney lambasted President Obama during a debate for having the foolishness to invest stimulus money in Tesla Motors, which has since paid back the loan with interest. He stuck to a narrative based on an ideology. The truth would serve us better.

From Jeff Madrick’s New York Review of Books piece on the subject:

“Both government research and entrepreneurial capital are necessary conditions for the advance of commercial innovation. Neither is sufficient. But the consensus among many economists and politicians doesn’t seem to acknowledge an equal role for government. Resistance to acknowledging government’s fundamental contribution to American scientific and technical innovation became especially vigorous when the federal government’s solar energy project, Solyndra, to which it had lent more than $500 million, went bankrupt. The investment was part of President Obama’s 2009 stimulus package, which included a substantial program of loans for clean energy, run by a successful former hedge fund and venture capital manager. But the solar energy company was undermined when the high price of silicon, on which an alternative technology to Solyndra’s was based, fell sharply, enabling competition, especially from China’s solar companies, to underprice the American start-up.

Solyndra’s 2011 bankruptcy led to a Republican congressional investigation, and a bill to end the loan program altogether. Although venture capital funds, such as Argonaut Ventures, controlled by Obama fund-raiser George Kaiser, were among the major investors in Solyndra, critics saw the failure as proof that government couldn’t and shouldn’t invest in such new ventures at all. ‘Governments have always been lousy at picking winners, and they are likely to become more so, as legions of entrepreneurs and tinkerers swap designs online,’ wrote The Economist in 2012. But including Solyndra, only roughly 2 percent of the projects partly financed by the federal government have gone bankrupt.”