Abstract: Taxes are the peoples energy. Governments invest taxes in infrastructure. Sometimes these infrastructure investments fail. Sometimes they suceed and benefit all. Sometimes ideas like the internet benefit the whole world. There should be some quantifiable way to harness the energy of a good government investment from all who benefit from the invention and did not pay for the up front research.
Failed Government Investments - Unquantifiable?
I used to work on a multi-billion dollar defense project that worked on at the time leading edge distributed database and logistics ideas. I believe the project served a second purpose as a study of matriculating ex-armed forces personnel into IT management. Many dollars were spent developing these technologies but not much of a usable system was produced. We used to joke that really the only good thing that came out of it was there were jobs for people and that the skills and knowledge acquired on this project would serve other corporations when people from these projects moved on to real world jobs. The government would recoup it's losses by corporate American productivity and the ensuant tax base that productivity generated. Unfortunately in this situatiion, there is no way to measure if the money spent of failed grandiose projects is truly recouped by the tax base of increased productivity when folks move on to other jobs. Is there measurable value in turning ex-armed forces personnel into productive civilians? How do you quantify all that to make up for the tax payers money spent on a defense project that never built a usable system? Spiritualy, you could use the idea of carma. Well, if money were energy and you put a lot of the peoples energy into a well intentioned project but in the hands of a corporation that didn't have respect for the people's energy, you'd get some carma points or energy return (people in the project going off and being productive elsewere) for the good intentions but you certainly wouldn't have enough carma to produce the same amount of energy as you put in. It's fuzzy. What we need is people thinking about ways to quantify success of a project. Maybe we need to tag all the people who worked on government projects and calculate the tax base generated after they left a high profile project.
Well, sometimes failed government projects lead to improvements on failures so there should be some carma credit given for that. I like to think that our project would have succeeded in today's world where the internet is everywhere. Back in the day too much was spent trying to make a distributed database environment with a slow, antiquated network infrastructure. Maybe the government learned from this waste and in failures like these, the internet was born.
Successful projects should help everyone.
So the internet is an example of a government infrastructure investment gone well. The issue is American tax dollars went into building a global information infrastructure that benefits the whole world and in many cases for our thought leadership we are being battered by cheaper competition abroad. These people who benefited from our investment pay no direct tariff for the use of our infrastructure. We can think about the unquantifiable idea of carma again but how does that help your average American? Maybe all the people will collaborate together and develop the knowledge needed for non-fossil fuel dependent cars. I guess if the ideas came from other countries, that would be payment for our investment on the developing the internet. The health advances that were developed from the collaboration would help too...
Ok... Guess this is too big of a scope to argue out in one entry. I will recollect my thoughts and work on a more compound discourse on the subject.
