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Msg. 57904 of 65535
(This msg. is a reply to 57888 by Zimbler0) |
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No. And Yes. You are wrong, and you are right. I've flown a fair bit, I've never landed at an airport Wal-mart built. Nobody at Bain capital guided those planes. The road I drove on to get the that Airport was not built by Whole Foods, and Home depot did not build the dam that provided the electricity that lit those roads. Efforts to privatize such infrastructure have been done over and over, and clearly, the best way for it to happen is for governmental to open bidding, and for enterprise to close the deal. Your infrastructure argument has no teeth. that is what infrastructure spending is, and it works. It is not Solyndra. But R&D.?? The US enjoys the most remarkable tradition of innovation in areas of medicine, biotechnology, advanced materials, composites, and so on the world has ever seen. It is government, government, governmental. And now, you are correct, it fails. The failure is this: on the right lobbyists have been able to channel funding to, well themselves. So one million$ in research money to foster research in new and imaginative composites doesn't go out in the form of ten 100k grants to America's best and brightest. It goes to Lockheed. No kidding. Governmental funding of research business wont touch has long been what has set America apart. But America doesn't do that anymore. The money that used to take chances and risks is siphoned off by lobbyists, to , of all things, give to the companies that are already going to do it anyway, because it is not longer risky, the ideas are well established. Add on to this is even the greater sin, the freaking liberal "targeted research" (seriously folks, is it really research if it targeted). So the left on certain issues (e.g. HIV) simply require that a certain percentage of spent money was spent a certain way. It didn't matter if you were researching tampons or treadmills .... it had to have an HIV spin. What happens is scientists stop deciding what science to fund (that which America did well for decades), they simply are required to move money in a certain direction without consideration of scientific merit. The right can be awful on this as well, they want a clear payoff, which of course, is not what research is. Obama's energy targeting polices are a case in point, Bureaucrats decided what is good science before it ever even gets to scientific review folks. On the other side the right has lined up its lobbyists to essentially say, 'the only people capable of discovery are Fortune 100 companies'. and so what used to be small grants to foster innovation is essentially taken a bunch of money, handing it to ATT and asking them to improve communication. So yes, it is screwed up. But this is comparatively recent. The bazillions of findings and results from NIH supported research, scientists, students and institutions cannot be swept under some "Solyndra" carpet. When research becomes social or economic engineering, it is usually a waste. (Solyndra, or Monsanto, or Archer Daniels, or 3M or any of the other folks that are getting all the "research " money). Both sides ruined a very functional system, the left wanted to cure disease and poverty and defined research as only those things, the right wanted to well, fund companies cause everybody else is too stupid, and certainly go apeshit if stem cells, gay people and stuff like that are in any way involved. But, the notion that most of what you see is not either a product of government or a product of demand government created where it let "the market" figure out haw to meet that demand) is stupid. Roads. schools. Hospitals. Fire Departments. The whole fucking military. Space. Satelites. Ever heard of the internet??? Airports. Dands . Power systems. Crap, power itself (certainly nuclear, 100% gov, uhh hydroelectric well, i suppose somebody private had something to do with it), ... obviously there are the things we agree on , that teachers are of government and hence they are bad, there are too many, and they make too much. But this is the problem ... enterprise has never and will never take real risks. Our government has stopped as well. Eventually all of the good new ideas will come from somewhere else. America will exhaust its reservoir of new ideas because the tea-party wont fund it, and when they do the left and the right pre target it either to a company that doesn't need it or an idea that lacks merit. But, still, the solution is massive federal research ... just lose the targeting, the lobbying and the "project program" funding. And as stated earlier, your roads and bridge thinf is FOS.
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