I also cannot find much information about this at the moment, partly because the new version of internet explorer is confounding my efforts to search and possibly because you could be asking the question from the wrong perspective. I remember hearing an interview with Noam Chomsky where he mentioned how the benefits from some military research projects were passed over to the private sector for private profit, the research and development having been paid for by the tax payer in the name of national defense.
I’m not to sure but I think the interview where I first heard this suggested was at Democracy Now. I have had a quick look around the net but could only come up with this link that relates to it.
Noam Chomsky: "Corporate Welfare in the U.S."
Chomsky argues that the Pentagon, along with NASA, parts of the Department of Energy, and several other government institutions, were developed and are maintained at least in part to support large transnational corporations. He points to the enormous profits that corporations have made from "dual use technology," technologies that are developed with public funds under the military and space exploration system, and then handed over to corporations to be patented and sold back to the public that financed their development in the first place.
Chomsky states that over fifty percent of all research and development conducted in the electronics, computer, aeronautics, metallurgy, laser and telecommunications industries has been done with the public's money. He points towards the satellites used by AT&T and the airplanes sold by Boeing as obvious examples of pieces of technology that were largely developed with taxpayers' money and are now used for private profit. |
