On Wednesday, January 29, 2003, at 02:24 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote:

On Wed, 29 Jan 2003, Tim May wrote:

...

Nonsense. What "political science" do you think was stopping Ford or Honda or Volvo or GM from introducing a hydrogen fuel cell car by 1980?

What I meant is lack of lots of fat federal grants for research on fuel reformers, hydrogen separation, proton membranes, alternative catalysts, and the like. The fund allocation (or, rather, lack thereof) was sure politically motivated.

Well, in your country (Germany, IIRC), perhaps such funding is permissable. In the U.S., it really is not. Constitutionally, that is. The government exists to do certain things, not to pick technology winners. Yes, I realize there was a space program..it was unconstitutional, IMO, as it had nothing to do per se with national defense or other constitutionally-specified purposes of collecting and disbursing taxpayer money. Other programs, like cancer research and diet studies, are even more unconstitutional. See also the next point, about the effects the "Moon Shot" had on alternatives.

Feds are sure inefficient, but the random dispersal of funds does tend to hit the far shots now and then. The private sector tends to ruthlessly optimize on the short run (because the long shot doesn't pay if you go broke before you can reap the possible benefits).

The effects are much worse than you imply. Government picking winners means that competitors are undermined and "deprecated." Not only does the funding distort the market, but the government often finds ways to actually _ban_ alternatives. (Sometimes the ban is explicit, often it is implicit, in terms of universities and corporations only being allowed to compete in For example, the space program. The Moon Flag Planting cost about 100,000 slave-lives (about $125 thousand milliion in today's dollars) to finance. It distorted the market for things like single stage to orbit, which might have happened otherwise. And it created a bureaucracy more intent on spreading pork to Huntsville, Houston, Canaveral, and other pork sites. (Surprising that Robert Byrd failed to get WVa picked as the control center. He was too junior then, probably.) I don't have time/energy to explain in a lot of detail why you are so wrong here, why your "slippage into statism" is not only surprising given your subscription to this list, but is also dead wrong. I won't bother responding to your arguments in favor of national socialism. --Tim May, Corralitos, California Quote of the Month: "It is said that there are no atheists in foxholes; perhaps there are no true libertarians in times of terrorist attacks." --Cathy Young, "Reason Magazine," both enemies of liberty.