I’ve never understood, or accepted, why “Government” needs to take the lead in any kind of R&D work with one notable exception: the Constitutional mandate that one of the Federal Government’s mandates is the defense of the country.
Related: Technology, Society, Cyber-Culture, Privacy, and Constitutions
The wielders of the scatter gun declare earnestly that they are serving such needs [of promoting science to spur economic development] by lavishing financial buckshot on space telescopes and number theory and the particle accelerator at CERN in Geneva, and giving out subsidies to millions of students to master such subjects. They are mistaken. The target is in the other room, labeled Technology and Engineering, and is well funded, thank you very much, by profit-making companies. Not STEM, but TE.
(H/T: Deirdre McCloskey and Alberto Mingardi, The Myth of the Entrepreneurial State)
Whether the Illiberals (they aren’t Liberals and haven’t been for a long time) like it or not, many R&D projects directed at military ‘needs’ have made their way into the private commercial sphere. The medium by which you read these pixels is probably one of the greatest examples of this.
The Internet.
Originally it was a military research project by DARPA. It’s purpose was a create a workaround to the “single line” voice communications technology of the day. Where a single telephone circuit, point to point, was constructed on the fly so folks at one end could talk with the other.
The project was to create a multi-path solution that could re-route data in case of a disaster at one of the intermediate nodes. In essence, it was the electronic version of our highway system (which in itself, was the realization that the German Autobahn was a “distributed solution” of physical transportation nodes as the Allies bombed the “point-to-point” transportation system of railroads).
It has changed the world. Ditto the 60s effort to land a man on the Moon – while many Governmentphiles point to that as a reason for the Feds to dump billions into R&D (which spun off lots of commercial products ranging transistor and material technologies), it was always a military project in preventing the Soviets from establishing a military base on the “high ground” of the Moon.
Those same “Govt-philes”, the same Progs that believe that the only entity capable of providing “good things” still hold that only Government R&D is the best and that the private sector simply rides on its coattails. This never was the truth for most of history (again, EXCEPT for technology applicable to military needs) and as the chart shows now, not true. Nor should it be.
R&D spending is NOT an enumerated Power of the Federal Government and for those naysayers, my preemptive punch: it should stop and be go unfunded. The Rule should be that anything that the private sector can or does do, Government should not. Frankly, the Feds have taken on so much at such unbelievable budget levels, why should we be surprised at how rancorous and partisan politics has become?
Because too much is at stake with other peoples’ money. It’s only because politicians can demand that other people pay for their pet projects that our budgets are too damn high.
No more coattails (if they even existed at all). The Progressives are always saying that Big Industry should be paying their fair share of taxes.
Sidenote: and their dirty little secret is that they KNOW that companies don’t pay taxes – the people that purchase their goods and services end up paying those taxes – which are just another component of the cost of doing business that gets bundled into the price you all pay. It’s an indirect tax on all of us that the Left, when they yammer about raising corporate taxes, hopes y’all are too stupid to figure it out.
Instead, let all the companies absorb all of the costs of the R&D needed to keep ahead of their competition. In ALL areas. Period.
(H/T: Cafe Hayek)
