Brian,
I find myself largely in agreement with the spirit of your post. An enthusiasm for innovation is to be commended. But I'm not sure your description of reality isn't just a bit fanciful
Re: but free markets are one of the unique things this country has,
Hmmm, I suppose that the European Union isn't a "free market"? Nor are the trading partners in NAFTA and the WTO?
Calling America unique w/r/t free markets seems to be the Hollywood version of things.
Re: and one of the reasons we see such great innovation here.
As you know, the Internet, our means of communication, sprang from a government lab. Our space programs, which made possible all the commercial comms satellites eventually, was and remains a government sponsor operation (NASA), the great developments in aviation and avionics are driven by government, most highly advanced medical research in this country has always been carried out at government sponsored or government owned labs. Once developed through basis research, many drugs have been essentially given away to greedy big pharma manipulators. The cutting edge of physics research is almost 100% a government sponsored activity.
There are relatively few and small areas of our lives where real innovation has been undertaken by the private sector. If you would care to provide examples, I might be persuaded that you aren't mistaken about innovation. The only innovation I see really exploding in the private sector is in areas of dishonesty such as public relations, talk radio and so-called "think tanks", such as AEI, Heritage or CSIS which are cesspools of ideology pretending to purvey scholarship.
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Re: Fundamentally change that too much, and you put that in danger.
We are in agreement that innovation is crucial to our futures. Where we disagree is that I see George Bush as a radical right winger who would tear down the very institutions of our society which have provided the innovation of the past 60 years, and replace them with for-profit schemes that by nature are forced to dramatically curtail R&D expenses while lavishing outsized pay packages of scoundrels in control who use PR, talk radio and think tanks to poison the minds of Americans into thinking this is progress. What it is is a society that is destroying its future for the sake of a tiny elite of scoundrels. Many studies of the compensation of executives, amount of money that the government applies to basic research, and numbers of advanced graduates in the sciences proves me out.
Re: I am not sure radical change would yield good results in this case.
Radical change, for the worse, is exactly what George Bush's irrational ideology of pampering dinosaur industries like the oil & gas industry are what are yielding such horrid results for the nation in general. |
