On 2012/10/03 06:53, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
On Wednesday, 3. October 2012. 2.55.25 jdow wrote:
On 2012/10/03 02:01, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
How about government funding? There is a tried&tested scenario used for some time now all over the world, say in science. For example:
Then you get what the government says you will want not what you do want. We saw that in Soviet Russia as a very glaring example.
That depends on how government is organized. In many countries the government does not decide how the funding is actually used and which R&D projects are financed. Those decisions are left to expert teams or peer review committees or such institutions. People who get to evaluate project proposals are typically the people who were voted by the community to be in those positions. It's called democracy. ;-)
You shouldn't judge the whole idea based on one lousy implementation that happened in Soviet Russia.
Dumb question: Why do you think it will be different any time in the future when it has never been different in the past? We already see this effect with Obama supporting so called "Green" industries that are going bust even with massive government subsidies. Governments push agendas and are answerable to nobody, especially when they control everything, such as your income, your ability to feed yourself, and so forth. Capitalism gives a feedback mechanism that prunes off things people don't want (Compuserve or AOL) giving them what they do want (Twitter, Facebook, Slashdot). Where is the realtime feedback mechanism within government?
{o.o}