A few thoughts related to the fake controversy over Obama’s “you didn’t build that”:

First, sure enough, the self-reliant businessman featured in Romney’s ads was the beneficiary of large government loans and contracts. This doesn’t make him a bad guy; pretending that he did it all himself does.

And as many others have pointed out, what does it say about Romney’s campaign that to run against a sitting president, one with a three and a half year track record, they have to lie about what he said to find a point of attack?

On a slightly more elevated note, Matt Yglesias has some fun with a prominent libertarian, Peter Thiel, who looks at the contrast between rapid progress in information technology and less rapid progress in “stuff” and blames .. the government.

In a way, I’m reluctant to make too much fun of Thiel because at least he points to something that I notice a lot. If you look at what futurists were predicting 40 or 45 years ago, they somewhat underpredicted progress in IT (except for the artificial intelligence thing), but wildly overpredicted progress in dealing with the material world. Weren’t we supposed to have underwater cities, commercial space flight, and flying cars by now?

But blaming the government is silly — not least because, via Mark Thoma, the government created the Internet in the first place.

The fact is that technological progress is uneven, for reasons that need have nothing to do with policy: sometimes you strike a rich technological vein that can be mined for decades, like etching circuits using photolithography, sometimes you don’t.

Consider productivity in two industries, from the BLS:

Does anyone think this contrast reflects the heavy hand of government on the grocery store industry — as opposed to the fact that there just hasn’t been a technological breakthrough that lets one guy at the counter serve 10 people at once?

That said, I still want my flying car before I get too old to drive.