Are you high or something? One can only wonder, given the following:

A. Nothing I said was sarcastic or ntended to be patronizing to you.

B. I have never cited fox news or the national review. In fact, I don't like them, so I don't know where you got the bizarre idea that I would dismiss your sources in favour of either of those.

C. If you make a statement about something, you are expected to provide sources for your statements, so if I WERE arguing against your understanding of the FDA, and I am not, since I agree with you on it, it's up to you to provide the source, not others to go looking for them.

I have no idea what you're talking about.

I was responding to a specific statement, i.e. "Government is much better than the private sector at scientific advancement." No further details were necessary.

But then the government couldn't tax and regulate it.

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A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

But there are apparently problems with using salt water in the electrolysis process.

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A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

Actually, the private sector is quite good at coming up with technology. In fact, most of the technology we take for granted was stuff that people in the private sector came up with all on their own. Once again, you've shown you don't know what you're talking about. A great deal of the univeristy research going on is done in PRIVATE universities as opposed to the government (state) universities. Government can certainly throw money at a researcher and can ask researchers to do specific research for the government but that's really about as far as it goes except for the relatively few government research labs that exist.

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A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

A lot of scientific advancement actually comes through indirect government funding, especially of projects that corporations don't believe will be important in the short-term profit oriented mentality they use.

This is a problem in medicine, as private companies are more interested in spending gobs of money advertising and producing functionally identical cosmetics and palliatives. Private business in medical technology is horribly inefficient, more so than Government.

Government is very important in science and technological development. Many things private organizations make they don't w/out government scaffolding. It's a myth that they do it by themselves or on their own incentive.

Yeah...not so much.

Yes, and "throwing money" at it is exactly what governments do that private sector won't. The private sector uses a short-term profit mentality, they don't think about what's good for society or what's better in the long-term. They don't like to make investments that are costly up front but yield benefits down the line, which is where government comes to the rescue! Yes, most of the work is done by individuals who are not directly working for the government, but most of the research funding and direction comes indirectly from the government.

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"Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states...Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds."



~Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

What he does is essentially underestimate the role of government in incentives and funding for research in so called "private" institutions. Private is misleading. the government has, and has had, a huge role to play in innovation and research and development in the maths and sciences through tax breaks, grants, loans and general funding or mandates. To a limited extend, the government has highly effective public development labs in agriculture.

The government would likely do a much better job in pharmaceuticals too. First step is eliminating the absurdity of medical marketing and the plethora of functionally identical, but cosmetically different--yet expensive--vanity or dependency drugs. The money can be put to better, more efficient use without 50% of earnings going back into marketing so they can develop yet another penis enlargement drug which the free marketeers will hail as a tremendous achievement of capitalism.

I'm actually hard-pressed to think of a technological advance in the last century for which the government was not largely responsible.

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"Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states...Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds."



~Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.