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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (14404)	3/11/2010 10:26:13 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 42652

If I started listing for you the technologies that were created as part of our space exploration program and then later commercialized for enormous US profits The lists is often exaggerated with items with no connection to the space program sometimes included. Also if it wasn't for the space program money and other resources would have gone elsewhere, and developed other things (as well as some of the same things). You have to consider the seen and unseen, not only the direct results and the obvious spinoffs, but what would have happened had the resources been used in a different way. That having been said the space program obviously sped up some development, but so did WWII and I'd hardly call it an investment. I also am an eternal optimist. I read a LOT of science fiction I'm also an optimist and I at least used to read a lot of science fiction (and still do occasionally), I just don't think 1 - That for the most part we need or even want big government as a way to get us to a more advanced future. 2 - That the fact that some effort has positive spinoffs doesn't mean the effort really qualifies as an investment. 3 - That tremendous changes will happen over the long run, but that its very hard to predict what they will be, and also in the near term future things are likely to be mostly the way they are now, esp. for items that require very large investments, and esp. for in areas that don't have any short to medium term path to be highly profitable. 4 - That subsidies distort price signals making us think that some activity is profitable and beneficial when it actually isn't.