We are dependent on foreign oil. Without foreign oil, our economy would crash and burn.
Its not an addiction, its what we do because it makes sense. Its a dependency in the same sense that I am dependent on supermarkets and other food stores. Sure I could sell my house, by some plot of land in the country and make a go at subsistence farming, or perhaps I could beg for food, or maybe eat out for every meal (putting restaurants in a separate category from food stores). None of those make sense. Any of those would be harmful to me, but that hardly means that describing my relationship to the local supermarkets as "dependence" is reasonable.
Any sudden massive forced change (and a cutoff of foreign oil would be one of them), would have very negative consequences for our economy, but that doesn't change the fact that using the foreign oil is just being rational. We could impose the harm ourselves by cutting off the oil, or by otherwise failing to use it, but harming ourselves because if we don't we could in theory be harmed by others, is usually rather silly. Researching and developing new ideas is fine, but actually starting a strong and rapid move away from oil (or just foreign oil) now would be harming ourselves.
There is no question that private capital speeds uup innovation.....but so does gov't intervention.....see NASA and Defense.
The government capital has to be taken from the private sector. Its not clear that there is a net increase in innovation. Look at NASA. It hasn't been able to reduce the cost to put things in orbit (or beyond) in decades. It can launch probes that require less weight to do the same thing, or that have new capabilities, but a lot of that is just leveraging advances made in technology mostly developed for the private sector.
The military certainly develops new interesting capabilities, but at a very high price, and it benefits more from technological advances in the private sector, than the private sector benefits from advances that where purely military in origin.
Which doesn't mean that there is no gross production from this R&D effort. Spend all that money on research and you are going to get some results. But that spending (esp. the military budget since its so much larger than NASA's) isn't a very cost effective way to develop useful technologies. Its justification (esp. for the military spending) lies elsewhere. |
