Everyone likes the government helping people, but at what cost?
Government-funded research competes with private industry, which creates barriers for private jobs and investments.
Government-funded research bows to political pressure.
Government-funded research takes tax payer money from one group of people and gives it to another group -- largely based on the lobbying efforts of special interest groups.
Should the government fund research?
L.A. Times
2012/12/27 18:58:40
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634 votes
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274 votes
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Can government play a positive role in economic development? To understand who built what in the construction of the American economy from its pre-industrial origins, a look at one of the drivers of U.S. innovation — venture capital — is instructive.
For more than three decades American venture capitalists have concentrated their activities and earned their returns in a very small number of industrial domains. In booms and in slumps, in bull markets and in bear markets, the information and communications technology and biomedical sectors together have consistently accounted for 80% of venture capital investment.
Why has it been in the world of information technology and, secondarily, biomedicine that venture capitalists have been successful? In brief: Only in these sectors did the state invest at sufficient scale in scientific research and in its translation to working technology.
For more than three decades American venture capitalists have concentrated their activities and earned their returns in a very small number of industrial domains. In booms and in slumps, in bull markets and in bear markets, the information and communications technology and biomedical sectors together have consistently accounted for 80% of venture capital investment.
Why has it been in the world of information technology and, secondarily, biomedicine that venture capitalists have been successful? In brief: Only in these sectors did the state invest at sufficient scale in scientific research and in its translation to working technology.
Read More: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-...
Top Opinion
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Fef 2012/12/27 20:06:29
Governemnt even does not have facility for research as universities etc.
And yes. But as joint venture only= share expenses, share profit.
This is very clear what 1% wants. Public expenses their profit.
The government (either side) has shown over and over again that when they want they can (and will tweak) the data.
Facts should be a stand alone. A third party (someone who can be trusted) should gather and analyze.Then collaborate with a small pool of people to come up with an accurate pictoral.
I deal with data. It can be done so success is the outcome but govt input is mostly a waste of time and money (in almost every case).
I can't believe the vote - amazing!
On A Side Note....I know of a case where a family whose pool (above ground) brust in a storm. They were fined for creating a wetland. The EPA is out of control.
Another example - Regulations for mom/pop community (business) landfills have so many regulations that are over the top. Common folk like myself would say (without detailed knowledge) that we want a clean enviornment but now I have become aware of specifics I am disguisted with the EPA's agenda.
A laissez-faire approach to research benefiting humanity has never worked, and is the cause of much poverty in developing nations today.
As for scientific research, whether in energy or medicine or anything equally difficult, the profit motive makes it inefficient by an order of magnitude to do it privately.
The private pharmaceutical industry is committed to not sharing information among its members, assuming that they are not a secret cabal. This means that every useless research path is likely to be traversed by more than half of them, sending the costs of the research up. So pharmaceuticals are far more expensive than they would be if done publicly. The real scientists are more interested in science than in extravagant wealth. Indeed in the old days, much fundamental science was done at their own expense by wealthy men.
As for energy, does anybody imagine that the fundamental research underlying the 20% of the USA's electricity produced by nuclear power could have been done for a profit, privately?
--George Washington
The so-called private sector worships money and nothing else. It has been repeatedly demonstrated that if it is not profitable, it is worthless.
Real science is pursued by people more interested in a knowledge of Nature, than in money. Corporations have no such innate instincts. Humans are innately cooperative, like female elephants, but corporations, like very large, self-sufficient animals (bears, tigers, bull elephants probably) are innately selfish.
The only alternative energy powerful enough to replace, or better still supplant, the fossil carbon that supplanted biofuels, sail, windmills, and even private water power, is the energy of the massive nuclei that supernovae created before the Solar System's gas cloud condensed.
The USA already has government-funded scientific information on two technologies that get about 200 times as much energy out of a ton of uranium or thorium as the generation presently in commercial use. The same technologies produce waste that is a thousand times less persistent than what Light Water Reactors produce.
I know of two companies that would like to build such reactors, and one country that has a very good chance of beating us at our own game. It is China, where their Academy of Science has already shown an interest in work that ought not to have been abandoned here. The private "energy industry" in the USA has to be bribed with tax breaks and subsidies even to consider solar and wind turbine technologies, which I compute are totally inadequate to threaten the fossil fuel business. Surprise, surprise!
We are still a very wealthy nation, but we waste our money on the preposterous notion that there is any person "worth" a thousand times what people from Mexico will accept as agricultural workers, risking their lives to "illegally" enter the USA.