It is easy to talk the talk. Now it's time to walk the walk.
I believe it would be cheaper and more effective to privatize as much of the American government as possible. Scientists working on projects of a dubious nature should have the decency not to fund their experiments from government coffers, while private industry can (and should) take over for over-funded and non-productive research projects.
Time flies like an arrow.
Fruit flies like a banana.
Private industry generally supports research with some sort of predictable payoff. Drug companies willingly spend research money to develop clones of popular drugs -- something just different enough to avoid getting sued. Basic research, research on rare diseases, and research on diseases common among people too poor to pay for drugs, will usually be neglected.
Developing a deep understanding of insects, particularly bees, is a waste of money until the hives start dying off and the whole structure of US agribusiness is threatened unless we can figure out what we can do to stop it. Knowledge is insurance against the unexpected.
Some companies support pure research. ATT supported the lab where the operating system UNIX was developed many years ago. It was developed just to be useful for the researchers who developed it, and not to make money, so they could make it simple and elegant and not have to structure it so that it would maximize the money people would have to pay to use it or interact with it. Because of this it is still in use today. But ATT could do this because they had a guaranteed market and could waste money on such research.
Certain fields that are building blocks for other fields but have no immediate payoff, such as pure mathematics, would not get funded. Since this would endanger national defense, the military funds such research.
Economic studies on modeling payoff behavior of mortgage backed securities would be funded, since they give a firm a competitive advantage in creating and trading such securities. More general studies about the stability of the economy as a whole would not get much funding, particularly if they seemed to show that the capitalist system tended to generate huge bubbles without government regulation. If they showed the opposite, they would probably find funding easier to come by. We could really use some research results right now about how to handle a worldwide credit crunch, performed by people who were under no pressure to come up with results that pointed to less government regulation (or more government regulation for that matter) -- people who could follow their discoveries wherever they led.
People who do research or anything else for its own sake are free in a way that people who do it for money are not. As a free country, we should support as much such freedom -- for scientists, musicians, historians, doctors, teachers, preachers, inventors, soldiers, etc. -- as we can reasonably afford. You seem to think everyone should have to serve money and practicality. Forcing this on everyone is slavery. I think people should be free as possible to choose what they serve -- money, beauty, truth, God, country, the good, whatever. Certainly the bills must be paid, but that's not what life is about.
My dearest Severed,
Perhaps I should have phrased my question differently. However, you bring out a number of very good points. There are SOME things the government should continue researching.
The Human Genome Project, of course, would have been better handled by a consortium of pharmaceutical companies. They would own the patent jointly, but we could revise our patent laws to assure that we all got reasonable benefit, which would be at least one practical compromise.
I still contend that squander factories like NASA need to come in line with economic reality. Return to the moon? Why not -- as long as a group of investors funded it and saw a reasobable return on their investment -- say, by mining elements that are found on the moon but not here on earth. Logistics would be a nightmare, but the breakneck pace of the Space Race was not only exorbitant, but very dangerous on top of that.
I think you have some good ideas. Maybe if we do some brainstorming, we can find a rational alternative to the tax-and-squander policies we have endured for the last half century under an assortment of administrations from both political parties.
great idea but impossible.....usa soon to be defunked and depending on where you live some foreign country will soon take over for what is owed or owned by them.....change will come hope it's for the best...surely our rich politicians will benefit in short run......but without morals all is short-lived
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My dearest Edbonnie,
America may soon become defunct, and all our hopes with it. If that happens, I know what I will do and that will be that. Is that so important as keeping the nation around for the next generation?
I have suffered too much pain to go through more. The sight of my homeland going to the dogs is bad enough but to make yet another start from nothing is more than I am willing to endure.
I think the question is not "the real" question that this nation faces. It should be why does the government feel that it must fund everything. That's where we are rapidly going.
The U.S. Government is already privately owned. It was incorporated in the State of Delaware as a not for profit religious corporation in 1988. You should talk to the current owners before making plans like this. They might consider it a hostile take over!
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