The problem with government

The problem with government

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/24/opinion/americas-underappreciated-entrepreneur-the-federal-government.html

"Imagine a world in which the United States government — not the private sector — is the economy's indispensable entrepreneur, innovating at the frontiers of science and technology, able and willing to take risks and to persevere through uncertainty.

That is the world depicted in "The Entrepreneurial State," a recent book by Mariana Mazzucato, an economist at the University of Sussex who specializes in innovation. And it is, in fact, the way the United States has operated since World War II. Through the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and other agencies and departments, the government has for decades gone beyond financing research and creating the conditions for innovation to occur; it has also envisioned the future, engaged in the riskiest experimentation and overseen the commercialization process."

This conceit that the Government is the superior form of enterprise is progressive fantasy. A state government perhaps, if the states are allowed to fail and disappear.

"willing to take risks and to persevere through uncertainty." is certainly true of any us federal program, but there is no risk if absolute failure is acceptable. Programs that risk and fail must have some downside if the failures are to be purged from the system. In government, failures clog the system and starve programs that might be effective. If program managers who failed, were to be removed from government never to return, government could be a effective innovator. In fact, if you view government as a parasite, whose goal is to grow itself, it seems to be a success, until the host dies.

In nature, the host dies and the smarter parasites survive by letting the host survive. Government isn't even a competent parasite.