Given the immense risks the taxpayer takes when the government invests in visionary new areas like the Internet, couldn’t we construct ways for rewards from innovation to be just as social as the risks taken? These ways might include: capping prices of publicly developed medicines; attaching conditions to public support, such as the requirement that profits be reinvested back into production rather than spent on speculative share buy-backs; allowing public agencies to retain equity or royalties in technologies for which they provided downstream funding; or by making income-contingent loans to
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