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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GuinnessGuy who wrote (110953)	2/1/2008 8:01:13 AM
From: Freedom Fighter	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

GG, I'm not sure what you don't understand. I think without question there are some things that have been done by government via R&D and investment spending etc... that couldn't and wouldn't have been done by individuals or corporations (unless they became such pressing needs companies started working together). However, if we looked at the total pool of money invested by government and then looked at the return on that capital, my guess is that it wouldn't be very high because government made so many bad investments (most likely as as a result of making political decisions instead of economic ones). In addition, the source of the government's funds for R&D and investment is tax money. So whatever the government did spend on R&D and investment was unavailable to be invested by the private sector in other things. WE never get to see what the private sector would have come up with if it invested the money in other smaller projects instead. They may not have come up with the same things, but the net might have been superior. Almost every company and government will have successes and failures for its investment dollars. It's not enough to simply point to the successes in order to justify all the investment. You have to earn a high return and get good value for all the dollars. Just as an example in the private sector, analysts measure the return drug companies get on their R&D. Just because a company produced one or two good drugs doesn't mean they are doing a good job. If they spent 20B and will only produce 1B of profit, they blew it even if they spent 1B on each of 20 projects and 2 were wild successes. Now I'm not saying the private sector doesn't occasionally go to government and say we need "X", I'm just saying that I don't think government will get good value in aggregate so it's probably a good idea to avoid that if possible. Certainly you should avoid pointing to some succesess as a justification for expanding government into new places it "doesn't have to go".