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People should be free to choose what is best for themselves as long as they do not infringe on the rights of others to do the same. I created this blog to discuss issues I have with big government, liberal media,and to talk about my support for capitalism and the Iraq War.
7 comments:
And you can't think of a single reason why anyone would vote for Kerry.
Scratching my head.....
http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060723/UPDATE/607230360
I didn't say there weren't any reasons not to vote for him...
Becaus eit's a potential miracle revolution that is still quite a while form being a perfected, marketable technology. The private sector has a hard time stepping up because there's a whole lot of pure research that needs to be done before this becomes profitable, meaning that the first 20 guys to invest a significant amount of money in it are going to get screwed. Furthermore privatrely funded research is much less useful to society because it will be proprietary, whereas federally funded research will be shared among the medical community, leading to much more rapid advancement. This is just like space- you can bet your ass that someday orbital zero-g factories and asteroid mining and etc. will all be incredibly profitable, but no one in the private sector has the investment capital neccessary to go from the current technology to where it will be profitable.
Wow, oil is a risky investment? Surprising then that oil companies are making record profits.
We're not talking about 'risk' investments, we're talking aobut monumental, very long-term investemtns which are certain not to return results any time soon and without a very large investment, simply because they are very promising technologies which are nowhere near marketability yet.
Lockheed Martin does not have a research and development budget on par with all the money the US government has spent on the entire space program since it's inception. And yet billions and decades more may be needed before space ventures can become very commercially profitable. If we wait for private investments it simply won't happen because the first people to invest in it are too heavily penalized.
The government cannot screw up supply and demand when there is no supply yet. Once stem cell technology has been developed to the point where it is producing marketable products (ie cures) tehn I would listen to an argument that the government should pull funding and let the private sector handle it. But at teh moment there is no market in this technology forthe government to disrupt.
You mean how much do heavily federally-subsidized drug companies spend on long-term research? Quite a bit, since those are the implicit terms of their subsidies. You still seem to be missing the point that this isn't a high-risk investment with a potential pot of gold at the end- no one company has enough capital and researchers to go from the current stage of the technology to a marketable product, because we're simply too far away from that point. That means that it is never in a private companies best interest to advance the research, because they'll run out of money and fold before they get something marketable, and therefore the research will never advance without either government or charitable grants. Furthermore, even if private companies could invest enough to get tehresearch to somehting marketable, we would still rather have the government do it, because a. All research advancements would be publically shared, allowing the research to proceed much much faster than if ten small groups work on it independantly in confidential private labs under nondisclosure agreements and b. Because then the treatments do not HAVE to be marketable, meaning that ALL cures will be pursued rather than just the ones that will turn a fast profit. This is not a smear at corportations, but a simply reality that if anyone in th private sector made such a gigantic investment they would be forced to focus all their attention on the most profitable applications in order to avoid folding and losing the chance for any treatments at all.
Communist countries like Russia, which - hey, what a coincidence- was winning the Space Race, until the American government decided to devote huge amounts of resources to advancing that technology and defeating them. Do you think that Americans would have walked on the moon in 1969 without federal money and policy driving the research?
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