MarkI-ZeroPoint <[email protected]> wrote:
> You CANNOT compare the stewardship and trust that TAXPAYERS put in their > elected officials vs private investment/business. There is absolutely NO > INCENTIVE for politicians to be frugal with SOMEONE ELSES MONEY! > They have exactly the same incentive that an employee does working at company, using company money. If the employees screw up, they are fired. The politicians lose the election. Needless to say, employees, managers and hired company presidents often do waste money. Or steal it. It is not clear to me whether they do this more often or less often than politicians do. You are arguing that the system does not work. Obviously, it does fail sometimes. Everyone knows there is waste in government spending. But when you argue that there is "absolutely NO INCENTIVE" you go too far. There is incentive and it has often worked. On balance, government spending on technology has brought far more benefit than waste. The GPS alone is worth more than the whole space program cost. Perhaps if the government had not launched the GPS, private industry might have instead. I doubt that, but it is possible. It is difficult to imagine how they would have charged for the use of GPS to recover their costs. However, that did not happen. You cannot run history over again to establish whether it could have. Here in the real world, where history actually played out the way it did, the government played a vital role in that technology, *and in just about every other expensive, large scale technology* over the last 300 years. That is a fact. It is not debatable. Counter-factual history is mere speculation and can never be proved. - Jed
