BigBallinStalin wrote:Stop that, TGD! Don't let her know that in order for the government to put something into the economy, it has to take something from the economy!
Not entirely, no.
Governmen research is not all productive in the sense you want to measure. However, that is why it is done by the government and not private companies. then private companies come up and market it.
Per your earlier question about NASA, etc... without the government we would have things that people can buy, but not many things that people need. We certainly would not know what we do about pollution and cancer, to name a couple.
Capilalism doesn't so much promote research as it takes advantage of research that is out there and turns it into a profit. For your premise to be true, the inventors would have to be benefitting directly. In MOST cases, they do not. There are a few exceptions, but there are far more inventors who have watched other people get rich off their inventions than who have actually gotten wealthy themselves.
Even so, I said from the start I am not against capitalism. I don't however want companies replacing our government. Nor do I want the government regulators, investigators to be even more hamstrung.
EXAMPLE:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_funding
An often-quoted case study is the first sequencing of the human genome, which was simulataneously carried out in two competing projects, the United States government-managed Human Genome Project (HGP) and the private venture capital funded Celera Genomics. Celera Genomics used a newer, albeit riskier technique, which some HGP researchers[who?] claimed would not work, although that project eventually adopted some of the same methods. However, it has been argued by some genomics researchers that a simple efficiency comparison for such programs is not apt. Much of the funding provided for the HGP served the development of new technologies, rather than the sequencing of the human genome itself. In addition, Celera started much later than the HGP and could take advantage of the experience gained by the HGP, which, as a publicly-funded project, made much of its work available as a basis upon which Celera could build. Though Celera's sequencing strategy allowed the sequencing of the majority of the human genome with much higher efficacy, the strategy used by the HGP allowed the sequencing of a higher percentage of the genome.
A Discover article " Science's Worst Enemy: Corporate Funding"
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/oct/sc ... te-funding
Most Americans rarely think of science as something crucial to the way government operates. Yet, as Seth Shulman explains in his book Undermining Science, “the U.S. government runs on information—vast amounts of it.” Scientists at the Department of Agriculture track airborne bacteria resulting from farm wastes, experts at the Centers for Disease Control examine samples to help guard against large-scale disease outbreaks, and regulators at the EPA set standards for pesticide use and exposure. By necessity, most of these federal agencies work closely with industry, but more and more their internal functions are also being privatized. Scientific advisory panels are frequently filled with experts who have close financial and other ties to the same industries that manufacture the products they are reviewing. Agencies also outsource their regulatory functions to private-sector contractors and forge new public-private research ventures.
Consider the Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The center has only two full-time employees and one part-time; until recently the rest of the center’s workforce was supplied by Sciences International (SI), a private consulting firm that has been funded by more than 40 chemical industry clients. For nearly a decade, the center had been outsourcing much of its work to SI, which assessed health risks and drafted reviews for 21 chemicals that the center was reviewing for their possible impact on human reproductive health. This April, NIH terminated its contract with SI after learning that the company or its employees had business ties to the chemical industry.
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On the FDA countering drug companies:
What’s troubling about these trends is that most federal agencies are poorly equipped to protect themselves from undue corporate influence, says David Michaels, an epidemiologist at George Washington University and former assistant secretary for environment, safety, and health at the Department of Energy. Regulatory agencies must rely on large quantities of scientific evidence submitted to them by private industry. This evidence is needed to determine the hazards and characteristics of industrial chemicals, products, and wastes. But according to Michaels, most of these federal agencies lack even the most rudimentary tools that a medical journal editor would use to assess the quality and scientific integrity of industry-funded research.
Virtually everyone interviewed for this article agrees about one thing: The U.S. government must strengthen its investment in science. The members of Norman Augustine’s 2005 National Academies panel continue to call for an immediate doubling of federal investment in basic science, arguing that basic science is a quintessential public good that only the federal government can properly fund. The rewards of basic research are risky and diffuse, making it difficult for individual companies to invest in.
