Government is Good at One Thing
Jun 12 2009, 23:39 EDT [updated Jun 13 2009, 00:20 EDT]
Before my next post I'd like to reiterate:
The Government is Good at One Thing
That one thing is spending extremely large and inefficient amounts of money to attain a goal. Many people banded together can make a things happen just by brute force. Think of the Apollo Program, the Manhattan Project, or any war of your choosing: they applied a boatload of money and resources in a short amount of time to achieve something that couldn't wait. In war especially applying twice the umph in manpower results in much better results - if you don't believe me then consider a bar fight when one team has twice the guys.The efficacy-through-inefficiency argument has some limits. The US got the atom bomb from the Manhattan Project but so did the USSR - by spending a fraction of the money on spying and despite the US spending a boatload of money to combat it. Efficacy-through-inefficiency must be very leaky because otherwise some company/town/state/country would have noticed and gone super-specialized (they haven't). Threatening key individuals with death and monitoring them 24/7 has been tried (USSR) but it wasn't enough to keep their people inside. Efficacy-through-inefficiency is limited.
Big Projects mostly aren't
Outside of guaranteeing mere survival Big Projects aren't useful. That is why every politician worth his salt couches every Big Project in terms of survival. If we don't spend quants of cash on X we face very-bad-circumstance. This is plausible when there are 30 million Nazis in Paris but not so much when "very bad things" means someone is smoking in a bar.Every time you hear a politician say he needs $10 now to save $11 later you should worry. Big Projects are leaky so wait for someone else to do it.