rain

In the water at Green Cay squall a comin

i’m going to rain on the parade with a little history that refutes the talking point concerning how this nation got to where it is today. For the record, Business did not do it alone. For so many the interactions of government and private enterprise in churning our historic economy is minimized in favor of private enterprise being the sole creator so to speak.

Many don’t know that the United States of America would not be where it is today without government and private enterprise working together.

Elk Horn at Green Cay a National Park

Lets take Alexander Hamilton for instance. When he was Treasury Secretary of the US government he instituted programs that would churn the economy. Harbors and river navigation were integral to moving goods from point A to point B.  Hamilton understood that for business to thrive smuggling had to be under control. Then as now smugglers detested customs collectors and like all business people everywhere they avoided paying duty (taxes) on their goods.

Hamilton asked Congress to commission a fleet of vessels that would patrol offshore and stop the flow of contraband and keep tallies on goods coming into American ports. This new service of revenue cutters would later morph into what we call the Coast Guard. Everything that moved on the water was fair game for Hamilton’s revenue taxes and as a result of his attention to detail he improved harbors, dredged rivers and kept pirates at bay with “government money” so commerce could flow.

Octupus at Cane Bay

Hamilton beefed up river navigation, sent out survey crews to explore water borne paths to the Pacific and created safe new paths for commerce to move west(the Lewis and Clark expedition was initiated under Hamilton) and although they never found a river path that would connect the Pacific and the Atlantic they did initiate new trails that would become major arteries in the movement of goods across our nation.

Octopus Eyes. Can you find him?

“After Hamilton’s initial forays into the west, dozens of other expeditions were sent out, from after Lewis and Clark, right through the 1850s, when the Army assisted or outright ran surveying expeditions to select the various routes for transcontinental railroads. The transcontinental railroads themselves were capitalized by massive grants of public lands in the west. And before those, the earliest railroads in the East were almost all surveyed, planned, and built by officers of the Army Corps of Engineers, which was the ONLY repository of knowledge of civil engineering in the country, so government had a huge hand in expanding commerce.

“The evolution of transportation continued through the centuries, with wagons and stagecoaches, flatboats, canals, steamboats, and railroads providing increasingly efficient, ever faster service.” Weingroff

"Modern metal working machine tools were developed in the early 1800s in the national armories. Their contractors, in response to a War Dept. requirement for interchangeable parts for firearms, came up with the new methods for making tools.  Studies have shown how the foremen and supervisors of these armories spread out into other companies, creating the modern metal working industry, and eventually leading DIRECTLY to the breakthroughs in systemization of industrial production by Thomas Edison and Henry Ford.

Ocean at Green Cay

Maritime steam navigation relied heavily on the discoveries of Admiral Benjamin Isherwood of the Navy's Bureau of Steam Propulsion in the 1840s-50s.

The automobile age was made possible by the Good Roads movement, which directed local, state, and federal governments to grade, maintain, and pave roads and highways. Then there was the Interstate Highway System begun in the 1950s by Eisenhower.  Today without our system of highways and interstates, manufacturers would spend obscene amounts of money moving their goods on private toll roads.

The aircraft industry was almost totally dependent on military funding at its beginning. This industry was basically created and underwritten deliberately by federal air mail programs.

Radio, at first called wireless telegraphy, was almost entirely funded in its industrial infancy by the Army and Navy.

Green Turtle at Cane Bay

Computer technology was developed under the auspices of the Army and Navy for purposes of gunnery control. After World War 2, the Navy in particular informally sponsored Seymour Cray and his development of super-computers. The internet, of course, began as the Defense Department's ARPANET.

For some in this nation it is extremely unfortunate that they continue to close their eyes to the vast improvements government has made on American lives.  That government has contributed and worked hand in hand with business to move this nation forward, needs to be hammered home.

We were not a wealthy Nation when we began improving our highways... but the roads themselves helped us create a new wealth, in business and industry and land values... So it was not our wealth that made our highways possible. Rather, it was our highways that made our wealth possible.

Thomas H. MacDonald
Chief, U.S. Bureau of Public Roads

Today we need to understand that government has a real place in moving the economy forward. We need government to invest our tax dollars in renewable energy, to invest in drug research and science, to invest in education and a whole host of other things that benefit all Americans. Private enterprise cannot do it alone.

Nurse Sharks at Cane Bay

Drowning government in a bathtub will not be good for America, we need government and as soon as we realize this as a nation we will begin to move forward again.

Notes: The list of government created aspects of our lives after Hamilton i copied from other sources. i unfortunately lost who to credit it with.