So are companies (Itanium, Windows Mobile, etc.) but what governments do well is funding the competitive baseline needed for big advances. We live in an age of wonders invented based on American research investment in the mid-20th century, and that worked because the government did not try to pick winners but invested in good work by qualified people (everything NIH, NAF, etc. do by competitive grants) or by promising to pay for capabilities not yet available (a lot of NASA and military stuff).

Just like it doesn’t work to try an ecosystem based on one species, a society has to blend government and private spending. They work on different incentives and timeframes, and both have pitfalls that the other might handle better.