The people know best how to spend their own money! Really?

Yes, we know how to spend our money on food, shelter, and entertainment, but do we know how to spend our money on infra-structure, police and fire, military, regulatory agencies, foreign policy, and basic research?

"Know best how to spend our own money" has been a mantra of the anti-tax, anti-government crowd as if government is just a sinkhole giving money away for no purpose.  They completely ignore that taxes pay for our roads, our sewers, and many other physical features of a civil society.  They ignore that without regulatory agencies a power company could change its rates willy-nilly without warning.  They ignore that without a military, there would be nobody to fight the wars that they claim we should get into.  They ignore that without the basic research into atomic energy that we would not have the nuclear energy that taxes have heavily subsidized.  And if they found this page with Google, they should thank the National Science Foundation, DARPA, and NASA for the grant to Stanford University in 1994 that made Google possible.  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation and many other pages.

If you want to grow, you have to spend money for seeds

After I wrote the blog entry "We have met the enemy, and he is us", I reread a bit of David Weidner's article.  One thing that struck me was that Google was founded with the help of a federal grant!

I thought I would check a bit further, and found "National Science Foundation (NSF) Discoveries - On the Origins of Google".  The article was written long after the fact and I didn't try to dig out the original grant.  I do wonder if Page and Brin would have even been in graduate school without the grant.

I don't know the size of the grant, but think of the huge amount of income taxes paid each year by the 16,000 employees of Google.  Think of the productivity increases of many researchers in companies large and small thanks to Google.  I wouldn't be surprised if that one grant paid many times over for all the similar grants made at the same time.

Would today's Republicans support Abraham Lincoln?

When I read Wired's "Republican Congressman Crowdsource Attack on Science", I thought of all the projects they oppose without even weighing costs and benefits.  The crowdsourcing is an attempt to get the general public to expose "waste" in federal spending, starting with the National Science Foundation.  They essentially take an apparently frivolous aspect of a project without looking any deeper into what benefits might be gained.  They have started YouCut Citizen Review.  Maybe the first cut in the federal budget should be to disband YouCut?

Would today's Republicans support Abraham Lincoln's push for a transcontinental railroad?  Especially with the huge outlay of bonds to fund it?  That would not lead to a balanced budget.

Would today's Republicans support Abraham Lincoln's handling of the Civil War?  Although today's Republicans are big on spending on the military (without any meaningful analysis of the benefits), they are also big on states' rights, the major argument leading to the Civil War.