Think Small and Throw Mud

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/13/opinion/13friedman.html?_r=1
I long ago realized this author is a good reporter but nothing special as a thinker - his thought process on everything seems to revolve around his desire that government take other peoples' money and spend it according to his ideals.  And why not?  It's not his money.

In this piece, he points to a process by which a few million, adding up to a billion over time, might be flung at the idea of accelerated science and technology development mills.  Who knows, perhaps this kind of government inspired do-gooder stuff would work - it hasn't very often, the sterling example being the government funded project to map the human genome, which was totally outclassed in both cost and efficacy by private sector efforts - but there's simply no real reason for optimism on this front.  If it was as simple as throwing money at projects, we'd all be eating bon bons right now.  Does he think no one's come up with this idea before? 

Interestingly, he throws a dart at the Tea Party movement - "Welcome to Tea Party America. Think small and carry a big ego."  This is totally unrelated to the rest of the article, and seems to have been inserted only as red meat to the author's sense of his audience - those who love all the big government ideas that the author seems to enchanted by.  Apparently, he thinks the Tea Party has 59 seats in the Senate, a majority in the House and also holds the office of the Presidency, thus the Tea Party's death grip on the US budget.

The obviously goofy part of all this is that there are plenty of entities besides the government who could throw a billion dollars at a project like the ones described IF THERE WAS ANY REASON TO THINK IT WOULD WORK.  The author has some sort of blinders on about where technological advancement comes from and who pays for it and why.  They had one of these types of deals in the 1950s to develop alternatives to oil.  The fact that the project failed doesn't mean every subsequent one would fail, but what basis is there to believe that this round of government backed investment would work when there are so few examples of government's success in determining when to invest what amount of money in which things?  I'd be willing to argue that the government's take over of the financing of science is the biggest brake on success in scientific research we've seen in our life times - because ultimately government only acts due to political imperative.  What we see in drug research, AGW research, health and weight loss research, is that once the inner circle is formed of like minded researchers, the research that gets funded is the research which tends to validate the significance and agenda of that inner circle.  "Squirrels begat squirrels." 
Supposedly, corporations are beholden to the almighty dollar and are corrupted by greed.  As if politicians and their sycophants aren't?  Greed is the constant - what mitigates greed is the incentive to cooperate to get satisfaction.  When we can satisfy our greed through coercion, all bets are off.
Government of course has but one tool - coercion.  Businesses, unless or until they can enlist the government to stave off the competition (e.g. Sherman Anti Trust and similar law), succeed via their mastery of cooperative arrangements.  This does not create utopia, but the outcome is far better than what is created by coercion. 
So the author blithely discuss his frustrations with the Tea Party while chatting up foreign leaders.  Perhaps that's the sort of thing he's best at, and apparently he can out earn most of by these pursuits.  I remain uninspired by his love of state control over everything that matters, and his generally small or silly ideas which he champions as if they were something else. If government were so wise and competent, it wouldn't need advice from the likes of him.