Government sponsored research and long-term planning is not where breakthrough innovation that bring prosperity come from. Otherwise, Japan would the the powerhouse of innovation with its much tounted MITS; tounted in the late 80's by the statists desperate trying to rebottle state planning as the former soviet union was collapsing and Swedish "thirdway" was stalling out. What followed in Japan was two lost decades, as the Ministry of Industrial Technology and Sciences poured trillions of yen into building faster computers, while not only missing the internet altogether, but falling farther and farther behind Intel and AMD in terms of processing power.
Government was a late comer to computer technology. Computational theory has been a practical science ever since Charles Babbage in the 19th century. Sure, over the past century and half, computational theory has been applied to mechanical wheels, punch cards, paper tapes, vacuum tubes, relays, and very large scale integrated circuit on semicoductors. The government's WWII involvement was only related to the vacuum tube stage of the development. It's questionable whether the government's involvement was more beneficial to the computer industry by hiring men like Alan Turing, or more detrimental by subsequently destroying the careers of men like Alan Turing. In any case, it would be quite preposterous to argue that the computer industry would never have accumulated the capital during the punch cards stage of its development in order to make subsequent development possible if the Nazi government did not buy a large number of punch card machiens to run its statistic bureau (aka Gestapo).
Computer networks of computers set up to talk to each other, including entire canonical network computing environment, such as ethernet and unix, had been invented and explored long before self-aggradizing fools like Al Gore came on the scene. Even within the private industry, innovations can languish in labs for years before being discovered by entreprenuers like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates came along to bring the technological potential to fruition. That's the power of the free market: it's not because any particular free market particiant is smarter than a government planner apriori, but in the market of free competition those who go the extra mile or got lucky rise to the top due to consumers voting with their wallets every minute of the day; that level of constant competition and dynamic resource allocation is singularly missing in the government sector. That's what makes government planning future especially inept . . . planning and reasearch into the unknown is intrinsicly speculative, do you really want bureacrats engaged in speculations with your money?
Old established private sector research labs have a tendency to bureacratize just like government labs; establishment itself attracts the very kind of people that you do not want for innovative undertakings! What will bring the future forward is an environment friendly to startup risk taking that brings investors and innovators together.
