It’s easy to forget just how generative government interventions can be. Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s research project at Stanford, which led to Google, was funded by the National Science Foundation’s Digital Library program. Were the NSF an investor rather than a grant maker for the public good, that investment alone would have repaid more than the entire NSF budget for the years the grant was made. In fact, the market value of Google is greater than the entire amount of taxpayer dollars spent on the NSF since it was first founded in 1952.
