so why are we wasting money, lets just keep the government spending so we can all get richer.
Well, if we spent it on 'risky' research like DARPA does or NASA did, then, yes. Things that are a bit too far out for a company to justify spending R&D dollars on... to get the process started, to do some cool things. Sure.
If you are talking about handing out free cheese to people who will never, ever contribute anything to society, no. Spend nothing.
As a military historian I can tell you that spending on war has generally advance human society's 'civilian' technology more than all other driving factors combined. Once you learn how to make a better cannon barrel to kill people at longer ranges with, you also learn to add vanadium to steel and make a car frame that is light, strong and lets you sell a Model T for $250 and put the world on wheels... letting them free up time spent cleaning up horse crap and dying of typhus... and let them concentrate on inventing a microwave oven... which also came from radar technology... which was a war expenditure.
Companies don't spend on war. Governments do. And after winning that war, the technology spills over to make civilian life better... until the next war.
There is a difference between social welfare and applied research. I am happy to have my tax dollars go to figure out how to make a laser that can slice a boulder in half. Because in doing that, they will probably also develop a superconducting ceramic that will increase the efficiency of power transmission by 80 percent and solve world energy problems all while lowering my monthly bill. THAT, IMHO, is money well spent.
Handing it to a bunch of Ghetto scum and free-cheese lazy-asses is nothing but a waste. But they vote themselves the money, so there ya go.
Cheers,
Sirhr
P.S. I'm actually something of a fan of the 'free college' concept. But not in 'college's' current guise where people spend their lives learning Marxism, feminist studies and Sanskrit. Nor a 'free college' concept that is just for little snowflakes to stash themselves for 4 years of bong-smoking and protests. But if someone has the brains and wants to study STEM... incentivise that. Rocket science, computers, applied physics, medicine, air conditioning repair... useful things. De-incentivise the degree programs (like law school and Medieval Plumbing Studies) that have little application. Don't ban them. Hey, if you want to be a Feminist Studies major, by all means. Don't expect it to be incentivized, because there is no return. I've said it before, I'll say it again... somewhere sitting in an African Village, a Detroit %$#thole or a Vietnamese rice paddy is the person who will cure cancer and invent the 90-percent-efficient solar cell. Those people need to be found and given the tools to accomplish this. If we are only educating the whiny elite little bi^%$es of hollywood stars so they can go on to destroy our Republic, we are doomed. Let economics dictate education. Not the wims of 18 year olds who all want to be Art History Baristas. They don't know what they want. You don't have to force them... but with the right incentives, we can point education in the right direction. But it will never happen, because the 'educator class' is all Marxists and they like it that way.
