Because most of the time, the point of such government "investments" is to be another hidden wealth transfer from the taxpayers into the pockets of those with government connections (your Siemens, T-Systems, Capgemini, Thales, etc). That's a feature, not a bug.

Imagine Dell, Zuck, Jobs, Page and Brin back in the day, waiting for handouts form the US government to fund their companies, instead of VCs. None of their companies would exist today.

Governments are only good at funding infrastructure, education, healthcare and defense projects, you can't rely on them to build you the consumer focused private tech industry the US VC industry did. It's not something achieved through central planning, and the EU refuses to get that, so it keeps throwing money into the "maybe it'll work this time" bonfire.

I switched sanitation to a private septic system. I bought a share of private well to avoid public water systems. I built my own roads and live in a community where all the roads are private easements so no tax money (you can drive for miles and miles without ever hitting a public road). Medicine, I made friends with a private practitioner that was educated at a private university. There are basically no police here, so I learned todefend myself. I send my kid to private school. Out of your list, the only thing I benefit from tangentially is public roads but they are way worse value than our privately funded ones (I first built mine with nothing more than a hatchet and a shovel for $0 and then later learned how to operate a backhoe).

I'm well aware I still use some public services, even if indirectly, but when I compare the costs they are all much more efficient when I have switched to private infrastucture vs trusting politicians not to squander it. My local taxes are now down to next to nothing, and when I look at what exactly I am getting for the ~30% I pay out to the state and federal the only thing I seem to be getting on ok deal on is the US navy protecting trade routes, maybe contract law courts, and nukes for mutually assured destruction.

The US hands out money extremely generously through federal grants, DARPA and orders which have to be made to American companies through things like the Buy American Act. Silicon Valley itself was spurred by the DoD spendings.

You're ignoring my point or arguing in bad faith, since I already addressed this to the comment you're replying to.

The EU also spent a lot into defense and R&D, the difference is the US gov didn't spend money in the start-up consumer market, but they let private entrepreneurs commercialize some of the solutions that trickled down from the defense tech into the consumer sector to make money (CPUs, 3D graphics, radios, etc).

This is where the EU is deficient and you can't fill this entrepreneurial visionary void with government bureaucrats shoveling taxpayer money around to their friends.

What did DARPA have to do with Apple's success in the music and phones business? What DARPA money went into the iPod or the iPhone? They were made with commercial off the shelf chips that the likes of Nokia and Ericsson also had access to, not some super secret US DoD tech.

Just like many SV companies, Philipps, Ericsson and Nokia also were government founded from selling radars and radios to the military initially before the tech trickled to consumer. Yet Apple is now a multi trillion company(that was nearly bankrupt in the 90s) and the EU phone companies have withered away. Why is that? Is it because of "DARPA and the government"?

The U.S. spends obscene amounts of money on crap from Microsoft and Amazon and Oracle and Google.

And Amazon got off the ground from Bezos selling books online from his bedroom then pivoting to webs services, not from receiving government handouts to start a e-commerce business. These are the kind of scale-up success stories the EU lacks and can't be done thorough direct government intervention.

> Governments are only good at funding infrastructure, education, healthcare and defense projects

My point: well, the US government literally funded what became the VC landscape you seem to imply can’t be spurred by a government and still routinely fund very generously companies which then become industry behemoths.

Every new promising fields in the US is flushed with government handouts through DARPA grants, federal research grants or supplying contracts. This money then irrigates the whole fields as companies do business with each other.

It goes all the way to the VCs. Take a look at the list of the US biggest investors and see how many of them got rich through companies having the state as their biggest customer.

Heck, Siemens and Thales which you seem to despise are basically acting like dozens of American companies which are entirely funded by the DoD but on a smaller scale.

I've already addressed this point here in the comment you're replying to, but it seems people like to argue in abd faith, or jump to comment without fully reading everything. Let me copy it again here: "The US government didn't give Jobs taxpayer money to design the iPod, he had to scrape it himself wherever he could and convince people that licensing music will be the future, and it paid off big time. That's the beauty of the free market that decides which products live or die, not the government."

>Every new promising fields in the US is flushed with government handouts through DARPA grants

What did DARPA have to do with Apple's success in the music and phones business? What DARPA money went into the iPod or the iPhone? They were made with commercial off the shelf chips that the likes of Nokia and Ericsson also had access to, not some super secret US DoD tech.

Just like many SV companies, Philipps, Ericsson and Nokia also were government founded from selling radars and radios to the military initially before the tech trickled to consumer. Yet Apple is now a multi trillion company(that was nearly bankrupt in the 90s) and the EU phone companies have withered away. Why is that? Is it because of "DARPA and the government"? Come one mate.

I am lost on why you fixate on Apple or why you talk about some secret DoD tech. The DoD buys a ton of things which are not secret.

And yes, the amount of money the US spends on its companies is a significant driver in the US economy success in a way which is not dissimilar to China through with more steps involved or Europe for that matters which also does it but on lesser scale.

There is no "come on" here.

This new comment adds no extra proof or value to your original claims.

Socialists milk the funds for their NGO friends, and likewise the center-right politicians divert the funds to their corporate backers. Two sides of the same coin.