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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (324219)	2/1/2007 9:07:28 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576346

Oil independence is entirely possible within 20 years. Possible? Maybe. Sensible? No. Within 20 years, we'd have alternatives that will beat the market price of oil and be competitive in the marketplace without gov't intervention. Maybe. Even if we do we won't have the infrastructure fully up to speed and the use patterns changed in that time. Look at how long oil took to surpass coal, or coal to take over from burning wood. I didn't happen in 20 years. But it takes massive gov't intervention and incentives to get us there quickly Which is a good argument against trying to get their quickly. If the gov't doesn't step in, then I believe alternatives will eventually win out over oil. I do as well, but on a more measured, sensible time scale. The investment will be made when they have a positive expected return, not for political reasons. Inventions from sending a man on the moon catapulted this country into a golden age of technology Spin offs from the space program, or even specifically the Apollo program, where nice, but if the Apollo program was looked at as an R&D effort it wasn't very efficient. Sure you can point to what was spun off, and it does give you some payback, slightly reducing the amount of justification from other sources needed to decide the program was worth it. But you can't assume nothing would be accomplished with the money if it wasn't used for the space program. That type of argument is used all the time to support government spending. The benefits are very visible, and the opportunity costs, in terms of what was given up by not employing the money elsewhere is not visible. Bastiat understood the idea long before the space program. He was talking about direct taxation and appropriation for public works, but the points apply just the same to intervention with taxes and subsidies to encourage private action. bastiat.org