15 years ago
July 2010
"Governments can take credit for a list of big inventions, from nuclear weapons to the Internet, from radar to satellite navigation. Yet government is also notorious for its ability to misread technical change. In America a truly breathtaking outburst of government-led idiocy appeared in the 1980s under the name of Sematech. Based on the premise that the future lay in big companies manufacturing memory chips (which increasingly were being made in Asia), it poured $100 million into chip manufacturers on the condition that they stop competing with each other and pool their efforts to stay in what was fast becoming a commodity business. As late as 1988, industrial planners were still criticizing the fragmented companies of Silicon Valley as 'chronically entrepreneurial' and incapable of long-term investing."
Matt Ridley
"Ideas Having Sex"
"Some on the right, including Sen. John McCain (R–Ariz.) and Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have proposed that Pentagon spending be fixed at 4 percent of GDP. It's a strange suggestion: Indexing military spending to GDP makes about as much sense as indexing your rent to your salary. And I suspect McCain and Mullen would not agree that the budget should be slashed from its current 4.6 percent level to the 4 percent ideal. The important question is not how much money we spend but whether we spend it effectively and meet our defense needs in the process. Demanding that military spending be driven by economic growth is just another way of saying that military spending is not about safety. It's about spending as an end in itself."
Veronique de Rugy
"Cutting the Pentagon Budget"
