On May 29, 2007, at 3:12 PM, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Horace Heffner wrote:
In other words, the failure here is in the scientific community,
not in the national political leadership.
I suspect this is not entirely true. Some of the failure may be
due to lobbyists and political dogma.
True. There is plenty of blame to go around. I should have said
"the failure is mainly in the scientific community . . ."
My solution to this old problem was to get it permanently as far
out of the hands of politics as possible:
http://mtaonline.net/~hheffner/LegacyPlan.pdf
Honestly, I disagree with this policy. I do not think that any part
of government can or should be removed from the hand of politics.
Well, it was also the goal to get the energy fund entirely out of
government as well: "When financially independent, and maybe sooner,
the agency should become a private non-profit corporation, a trust,
with special legislated benefits and duties."
Such a trust indeed would have its own politics, but the board could
be sued for malfeasance, or failure to operate within the charter. I
have every faith such an entity, if operated by the proposed rules,
could and would solve the problem. If NASA can put us on the moon
using lowest bidders, an independent agency can dole out money to
free enterprise, based on competitive bidding. We would be billions
ahead of the game right now with actual energy facilities online,
instead of doling out a few million here and there for research.
What's actually in the way: people's widely varied Pavlovian opinions
about government and politics of course. The end result of the delay
will be lots more pain born by those who can least afford it.
Regards,
Horace Heffner
