Monday, January 28, 2008

Hooray for the scientists! - They're going to save us, if we just give me them enough money. While funding scientific education should be a federal concern, I'm not convinced that the funding of things like "clean energy" should be done by the taxpayer. If the technology is viable, there will be more than enough private funding but we can't make technology work by throwing money at it.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You are correct, but federal funding of research has unexpected benefits. No private industry will undertake the basic research necessary to prove viability of almost anything. This is the net positve of Federal research dollars, it isn't just welfare for smart people, the American taxpayer should ultimately expect something for their investment. A good example of this is who would have ever thought that studying bacateria that live in boiling water at Yellowstone Park would cause the greatest advance in molecular biology in history. We owe everything from genomes, DNA testing, and modern anthropology to work done on boiling bacteria. Many many companies owe their entire existance to this discovery