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interesting thread.
just a couple of general observations because once again i have no time.
1. the opposition between markets and the state is false--there are no markets in the capitalist sense without frames of regulation (law, conventions, norms)--the legal frames that enable markets to function are state creations. so the interaction of state and market actors is a question so strategy, not based on a violation of some division (either at the level of type of agent or at the level of rationality) between state and firms.
2. most free-marketeers do what ustwo has done in this thread--when they define their starting point as a Firm modelled in the way that an econ 101 class models a firm, they tend to exclude factors like already existing state supports for r&d and other infrastructural functions (is r&d a type of infrastructure? i would think it should be understood as such...infrastructure geared around maintaining coherence in the future, just as electricity and water and communications are geared around maintaining operations and coherence in the present)
this is only logical as a function of neoliberal conceptions of the market, the particular definitions of market actors, of the way in which neoliberal political economy defines "nature" or the given, which is the basis for its construction of the notion of a firm.
3. it seems to me that the americans are really quite blinkered in this regard--they do not use state funding well to help firms face uncertainty in the future--instead, they tend to use funding to maintain advantages--particularly economies of scale--in the present. think the massive subsidies that are poured into corn production, by product extraction, etc. that the system is irrational has nothing to do with the fact that the state instituted it--and everything to do with the powerful corporate interests which use the state as a proxy, as an element in the machinery of externality generation.
dc hasit right on oil r&d...others above on other areas of r&d.
i dont see the market oriented position as saying anything, really: except that it repeats the premises around which it is built. neoliberal political economy is circular. that's one reason it is incoherent.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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