In fact, there are a lot of illusions about that. It’s commonly believed that the United States is a market society with entrepreneurial initiative and consumer choice, and all of those wonderful things, but it’s very far from that.

In fact, the very place where we’re sitting is a good illustration. What’s MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology]? MIT is technically a private institution, but it’s publically funded through the government. What is it funded for? Well, it’s funded to create the technology of the future, which private corporations can make profit on. So the main elements of the productive economy now, like computers and the Internet, were developed right here, and similar places, under Pentagon funding for decades, not short periods. The public was paying the cost for a long period. The public was taking the risks, and it finally ends up in Bill Gates’s pockets.