Is the Government Responsible for Progress?

I'm sure that nearly all of my fellow wingnuts have heard of Obama's claim that the government is responsible for progress. Isn't it a bit odd that somehow things were invented even before the government got involved? (I won't more than mention that places with more government got less high technology.) In addition, many of the technologies backed by government have been failures. As I said a few years ago:

While I'm at it, I've noticed that science fiction's biggest prediction failures have tended to be in areas backed by central planning. Nuclear power, space travel, artificial intelligence, large-scale urban planning, brainwashing (this applies to dystopian predictions too), …

There's also the little matter that the Internet was an obscure niche technology until the government started getting out of the way. (Nuclear energy and space travel also look like they're starting to benefit from less government support.)