<I didn't realize those included in the class of leftist, which I interpret to mean the population that doesn't agree with Ayn Rand, have a creed.

Sure they do. Give me a hard-core leftist which, thankfully, is not represented in great numbers on this board, and I can predict exactly what their response would be to any given issue or question (I've formulated a theory on this which I will post elsewhere.) To be fair, as you point out, the same could also be said of the hard-core right-wingers (Ayn Rand falls into neither category). This is why the more intelligent liberals are a lot more interesting to argue with. They can still surprise me.

You presuppose that the private sector is somehow incapable of creating large, complex, and expensive infrastructures. Of course, this is done all the time. The private sector builds many things that cost billions and take years to develop.

Your examples of the many things that would never have been built or developed unless the forward-looking and far-seeing government did it are mostly old news. I will grant that some things exist now because they were spurred by government programs, mostly military in nature. But that does not mean they never would have existed otherwise, or that, more likely, more cost-effective alternatives would have been found. I'm sorry, but most massive government projects are ineffective, expensive, and primarily a means of passing funds to supporters. The few that actually pay for themselves are quite rare. *

Just to detail one example: Do you think rural America would still be without electricity without government subsidies? Perhaps farmers would have formed cooperatives to run the lines. Oh yeah--they did this in many areas. Maybe other solutions would have been found. Perhaps there would have been a real financial incentive to develop decentralized energy sources, like solar or fuel cells. Maybe nowadays most farms would have their own power plants. Who knows? Maybe there would be fewer rivers dammed, fewer large subsidized power facilities. Maybe houses would be covered with solar panels after the huge farm market made them financially practical.

All your other examples fall into the same category. Had not government funding been available to create certain solutions, alternatives would have been found. I can go into details like I did above, but frankly, it would be alternate-history "Probability Broach" speculation, and not prove anything. Suffice it to say, maybe some things would have happened much later, like manned space flight. Maybe some things sooner, like decentralized power and communications. Just because the government DID pay for something, it does not automatically follow that it would never have existed otherwise. Airports, roads, atomic power...all within the reach of the private sector--assuming it made sense to develop it in the first place. Just for fun, you might want to ponder how our railroads would be doing now if highways had not been subsidized.

For a little more background on Eli Whitney, see here:

...But, for the first whole product whose parts could be interchanged, historian Ken Alder takes us to Paris in 1790 [1]. Gunsmith Honoré Blanc had made a thousand muskets and put all their parts in separate bins. He called together a group of academics, politicians, and military men. Then he assembled muskets from parts drawn at random from the bins. By then, Jefferson had already visited Blanc's workshop and written back to America about the method.



Jefferson was president when Eli Whitney duplicated Blanc's demonstration 18 years later. No one realized it then, but Whitney was faking it. He'd carefully hand-crafted each part so they'd fit together. Whitney sold the government a huge contract for four thousand muskets. He took eight years to deliver them and then the parts weren't interchangeable after all.



So, maybe I have to give you this one. A perfect example of a government-financed operation after all.

...Biotechnology, as example, has the possiblity to change the world and the nature of man-kind itself. Fifty years of massive government investments were required before the first results started to appear.

I'm not sure where you got the idea that no one would be working on biotechnology without government funds. There is a lot of work going on in the private sector. Maybe you are referring to multi-billion dollar programs like the War on Cancer, the War on Aids, or the War on Warts. Okay, I made that last one up. Government science programs, while they do have some successes, do not have the world's best cost-benefit record. Might I point to the example of the human genome project? Or the Supercollider? The bit about Bell Labs and IBM being quasi-monopolies, so they were the "exception," is a bit of a reach. Most industries have robust research programs. The computer industry has been doing just fine advancing circuit technology on its own.

...We do not have a free market now, didn't have one yesterday, and won't have one tomorrow. We have a mixed economy and we have to work to keep this balance.

I'll grant you this one. The government has thoroughly metastasized itself into every aspect of the private sector, and to pretend we can suddenly create libertarianism out of this is a fantasy. But at least we can stop moving towards a totally centralized economy--the destruction of many nations--and move in the other direction. The balance is not being kept, to say the least.

Ah so, grasshopper! "We are like a big fish that has been pulled from the water and is flopping wildly to find its way back in. In such a condition the fish never asks where the next flip or flop will bring it. It senses only that its present position is intolerable and that something else must be tried." Daedalus (spring '93)

Profound, but not sure how it applies. Are you implying that my thinking is random?

The whole gist of your line of thought is that somehow all the intelligence, the forward-thinking visionaries, the "big picture" guys, reside in Washington, DC and other government centers, with no one of intelligence in corporations and the private sector. Just looking at all the players right now, I simply can't see how you can come to this conclusion.

*Needless to say, this is a touchy subject on a Space Board.