Let’s say that you own a business. Did you build the road in front of your store? No, the government built that. Using taxes. How about the three backbones of interstate commerce: canals and navigable waterways, railroads and the interstate highway system. Who made those? Does individual enterprise make sure that potholes get filled every year? Does WalMart ensure that a bridge can keep safe the ten thousand commercial trucks that roll over it every week? Railroads are only slightly more complicated. The government set aside enormous stretches of land, bought it or claimed it through eminent domain and then ‘sold’ it all to railroad companies for pennies and a pack of bubble gum. It was not hard to make a fortune when Uncle Sam happily gave you vast stretches of dirt that would go up a hundredfold in value as soon as you lay those tracks down.
Government made the internet. Most people who earn college degrees get them from state schools. Not from worthless for-profit schools, but from schools that produce an education with some value. IBM never had to teach its staff the principles of engineering because government-funded schools produce some of the top STEM graduates in the world. Did IBM pass the Morrill Act? Did Xerox set aside hundreds of thousands of acres in each state to permanently endow a college opportunity for each qualifying American? No, they did not. IBM and Xerox attracted the best talent and helped shape the modern American economy precisely because the American system gave talented entrepreneurs a leg up and granted them the freedom to focus on what they do best.
We need individual entrepreneurs to compete with one another and take risks to drive the economy forward. However, individual entrepreneurs would ‘compete’ for the protein they can find under rocks if they had to do it without the many things that government has already done for them.