These are examples of economic war (Sun Tsu) tactics rather than "things of real worth".
For example, I can't think of many notable inventions that came out of any of the associations you mentioned. Your examples are simply examples of amassing a centrally controlled industrial and economic army in order to capture territory. It's war without bullets.
What I am talking about are things like finding the cure for cancer. That is not going to be centrally planned. You can throw all the money you want at the problem, government or private. There might very well be a kid who is still pooping in his diapers today who will stumble upon the solution in another twenty years. No amount of money is going to dig-up that solution until it, well, just happens. Will it happen? Sure. Eventually. But you are not going to centrally plan it. Even if you setup a government laboratory to hire every single cancer researcher coming out of every university on the planet central planning might very well fail. For all we know it will be a marine biologist with a unique view of cell biology who will discover the solution.
If you've read a few of my posts over time it should not come as a surprise that I am a huge proponent of the private free enterprise approach. I think governments, with the passing of time, are becoming less and less relevant and are horrible blunt instruments that try to micro-manage our lives and do a really bad job of it. In the past few decades, regardless of political party affiliation, the US government has given us a perfect living example of how badly things can degenerate when politicians are solely driven by their need and desire to remain in power. Years go by and nothing happens. Or, even worst, the things that do happen are driven purely by the need to manipulate the population for votes.
Humankind has moved from feudal slavery to the kind of freedom we have today for a reason. That did not work. This works better. I think our future has far less government in the context of an educated, responsible and self-reliant citizenry using private resources to make everyone's lives better.
Of course, these things happen slowly, and they should. Too many corner cases to deal with.
Like your other interlocutor, I find your stance here too rigid.
Here's the example that struck me:
"... finding the cure for cancer. That is not going to be centrally planned. You can throw all the money you want at the problem, government or private. ... No amount of money is going to dig-up that solution until it, well, just happens."
You're setting up a strawman here which indicates you don't know how large scientific problems are solved. In particular -- it's not like there is some grand plan that starts now and ends with "the" cure for cancer. But there is a method, that can be successful in solving hard problems.
There will be one or several advisory boards of people who have basically dedicated their life to aspects of the problem (e.g., a subcommittee of the National Academy of Science). Their expertise will be staggering.
They will produce a roadmap. It will be followed (mostly) for a while, with government or private sponsors. Over time, ideas will be funded and pan out or not, the board(s) will change, roadmaps are redrawn, and directions shift.
It's not some fixed plan. There are revolutions in disciplines, when people decide that prior approaches didn't work, and just abandon them. Staying at the forefront is highly competitive, because you're basically competing with the best people in the world.
Maybe (as has been the case with cancer) people will decide that it's a harder problem than first supposed, that there are a multitude of causes, some with easier solutions and some whose solution is still unknown.
Maybe (as with numerical weather prediction) the progress will be rather amazing, and in a couple of decades you will have a robust system that people take for granted, but that was just a crazy dream, originally. Hey, that's progress for you.
Private enterprise didn't develop and test NWP. And it certainly couldn't have been solved by cottage entrepreneurs.
My overall points:
(1) There is a large class of important technical problems that are not solvable by small entrepreneurs, or even by corporations.
(2) The "big science" solutions that have been developed do not use some kind of state-planning-from-1950 paradigm -- they are much more adaptive and competitive than you seem to believe.
I agree that my perspective above is influenced by the problems I have worked on in my life, and observed others (more gifted than I) work on.
These are examples of economic war (Sun Tsu) tactics rather than "things of real worth".
So shooting up all the way from war-ravaged societies to developed first world economies in just 40 years (from the 40s and 50s to the 80s) doesn't count as "real worth"?
You are just discounting or dismissing what doesn't fit within your ideology rather than considering the evidence.
No. You simply see things through "government and the public sector are great" glasses and I don't. Perhaps you are a government worker. I don't know. I have been an entrepreneur my entire life. And my parents have been entrepreneurs their entire lives. And, you guessed it, my grandparents have been entrepreneurs their entire lives. So my family has a thread of self-reliance that spans multiple generations, cultures and continents. It is very likely that my world view is vastly different than yours across a wide range of areas. And, as I have said many times, that's OK.
No, your stubbornness is not OK. It is called a lack of intellectual integrity.
You aren't supposed to go around wearing prejudiced "glasses" based on what your grandparents did, you are supposed to try and see things as they are - and be open to revising your opinions as necessary.
I suggest you stop pretending to be Burt from Tremors long enough to try being objective. You might like it.
As it happens, I have never been a government employee and basically all my professional experience has been in the private sector. That shouldn't dictate my opinions.
The same way that the fact that I have worked in data cleaning before doesn't make me an advocate for data cleaning.
Now if I try to advocate that a public sector hospital cafeteria is just as nice as a commercial cappuccino bar, I'd look silly, because that is an example where the free market does better.
When you dismiss all that has been achieved by the tiger economies because of your sheer prejudice, you too look very silly.
It is also silly to assume that private sector = entrepreneurship and government = master planning, which is simply not true. Counter-examples:
1) A lot of the master planning that the Japanese and Koreans do is implemented by their private sector, which is clear from the links that I provided.
2) A lot of the private sector even in the US consists of large corporations who do master planning internally using ERP systems.
3) The people working in these companies are also not showing any kind of entrepreneurship or cowboy self-reliance; they are private sector bureaucrats churning out TPS reports
4) The DARPA funding for Internet and other CS research was government funded - but by throwing money at Professors, not by politicians micromanaging the thing
Maybe looking into Zen might help you with your world view problems.
For example, I can't think of many notable inventions that came out of any of the associations you mentioned. Your examples are simply examples of amassing a centrally controlled industrial and economic army in order to capture territory. It's war without bullets.
What I am talking about are things like finding the cure for cancer. That is not going to be centrally planned. You can throw all the money you want at the problem, government or private. There might very well be a kid who is still pooping in his diapers today who will stumble upon the solution in another twenty years. No amount of money is going to dig-up that solution until it, well, just happens. Will it happen? Sure. Eventually. But you are not going to centrally plan it. Even if you setup a government laboratory to hire every single cancer researcher coming out of every university on the planet central planning might very well fail. For all we know it will be a marine biologist with a unique view of cell biology who will discover the solution.
If you've read a few of my posts over time it should not come as a surprise that I am a huge proponent of the private free enterprise approach. I think governments, with the passing of time, are becoming less and less relevant and are horrible blunt instruments that try to micro-manage our lives and do a really bad job of it. In the past few decades, regardless of political party affiliation, the US government has given us a perfect living example of how badly things can degenerate when politicians are solely driven by their need and desire to remain in power. Years go by and nothing happens. Or, even worst, the things that do happen are driven purely by the need to manipulate the population for votes.
Humankind has moved from feudal slavery to the kind of freedom we have today for a reason. That did not work. This works better. I think our future has far less government in the context of an educated, responsible and self-reliant citizenry using private resources to make everyone's lives better.
Of course, these things happen slowly, and they should. Too many corner cases to deal with.