A little funding for basic computer science research is not big government. Bailing out banks and giving private solar companies loans is big government.
Are you really going to criticize the government for investing in American companies of which a couple ones failed on a VC news site.
Yeah, companies fail. Yeah, the American government invests in American companies. Yeah, the American government can afford it. Right now the US treasury bonds that are indexed to inflation have negative interest rates[1]. Investors are _paying_ Uncle Sam money to take care of their money. The market is telling the government: invest, invest, invest.
1. http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/in...
I am. The government is not a VC firm. It's investment are invariably political and not business based. There's a huge potential for waste there, not to mention conflict of interest. A DoD project that happened to have civilian applications is a different beast entirely.
The greater good is often politically based, it's true. It may not be business-based at all. Fundamentally, a politician can use any issue as a talking point, and certainly, a politician that funds an idea that creates something good will use that for their own gain or another's detriment. But simply because an idea is politically based doesn't mean it is not worth pursuing, or that the business world would do it any better.
In a way, this is what the government is doing in solar. Solar companies need to be funded and researched now before the market makes solar (and alternative energies in general) viable on a large scale. Right now solar is too expensive to produce and the price of oil gives little incentive to change habits. For the greater good, companies must be founded and research performed that will ultimately decimate the entire energy sector of the economy. Few VCs are going to be interested in destroying value, and yet we must do this before it is forced on us by the limits of the natural world.
It is not a perfect vehicle but only the government has the pockets and patience to make that happen. Some will fail. That does not mean we should never try though. That means all those on the sidelines cheering for government failure should instead try to assist with better solutions and better oversight. Most are happier to criticize and make sweeping judgements though.
If you want the government to fund scientific advancement so that alternate energies can become reality, that's one thing, but the government shouldn't be funding provably unsound companies just because they happen to be in a popular field. It's comparable to investing in Pets Dot Com because the Internet is the new thing.
At best government funding of industry won't actually improve the industry and will just be a colossal waste of money. At worse, it will be yet another avenue for politically connected connected millionaires to get free public money put into their private ventures.
The great thing about government is we can involve media, we can send FOIA, and we can scare politicians into doing the right thing if necessary. If government corruption was as bad as you seem to think, Solyndra would still be getting paid and none of us would know about it.
The problem isn't that the government is currently actively corrupt (it isn't for the most part,) it's that the more it get's involved in the economy as member rather than a governing body, the more motive individual government members and workers have to be corrupt. We have an active free press and law enforcement agency which catches corruption but that's not a good reason to create conflicts of interest where there shouldn't be.
But what else is there? How is government supposed to create the right conditions for a market solution? The solution was supposed to be carbon credits by making using polluting materials gradually more costly over time and thereby creating the conditions for clean(er) energy to be viable in the market. But that was rejected outright as a "tax."
Government as a member in the market is bad, we can agree there. But outside of direct investment, it gets politically difficult to change anything.
US Federal Budget is dominated by 3 things: Defense, Medicare, and Social Security. The research arm of the DoD makes up a pretty small part of the Defense budget, and the last two, Medicare and Social Security, are both (inter-generational) redistribuions. So this whole argument over the internet is really just political stupidity, both for liberals who hold it up as an example of how effective Federal spending can be, and conservatives who want to re-write history.