The giants of Silicon Valley have a lot in common with Laura Ingalls Wilder, who portrayed her life on the prairie as a triumph of self-sufficiency, barely mentioning that the government underwrote the railroads, provided the farmland and tided the family through rough winters.

Tech companies, too, like to tell stories in which government rarely appears except as an outside force threatening to break the beautiful things they’ve created with their minds and their hard work. The part of the story that doesn’t get told is how Silicon Valley’s successes have relied on the steady support and occasional dramatic interventions of the federal government.

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