Techno-libertarians have a sense of themselves as comic book heroes who use their vast superior intellect and willpower to move mountains. The only things getting in their way, in their telling, is jealous faceless bureaucrats out to cripple them because they aren't them.
It's especially ironic that by far the most notable of them all is the world's most famous subsidy farmer. Every company that Elon Musk's had any success with since PayPal has been built on an edifice of government largesse. Tesla has benefited not just from endless subsidies, but also was rescued from liquidation by the same loan program that lost money lending to Solyndra at around the same time. Declaring that the government made money on the loan to Tesla misses the point; if the government only made loans that were guaranteed to be repaid, it wouldn't have any reason to be making loans at all in the first place.
And, of course, SpaceX in its entirety is the government outsourcing NASA's functions to a private company.
What they'll discover in a hurry is that upending the structures that made the existence of their companies possible in the first place isn't a great long- or even medium-term strategy.
Techno-libertarians have a sense of themselves as comic book heroes who use their vast superior intellect and willpower to move mountains. The only things getting in their way, in their telling, is jealous faceless bureaucrats out to cripple them because they aren't them.
It's especially ironic that by far the most notable of them all is the world's most famous subsidy farmer. Every company that Elon Musk's had any success with since PayPal has been built on an edifice of government largesse. Tesla has benefited not just from endless subsidies, but also was rescued from liquidation by the same loan program that lost money lending to Solyndra at around the same time. Declaring that the government made money on the loan to Tesla misses the point; if the government only made loans that were guaranteed to be repaid, it wouldn't have any reason to be making loans at all in the first place.
And, of course, SpaceX in its entirety is the government outsourcing NASA's functions to a private company.
What they'll discover in a hurry is that upending the structures that made the existence of their companies possible in the first place isn't a great long- or even medium-term strategy.