On the recordJune 11, 2013
You make a good point. I remember having a conversation with a friend of mine who is a lot more conservative than me. We were talking about the government's role in these different things. He said, Well, what about the phone company and the original government investments into telephones? As the conversation proceeded he said they weren't doing it well enough and the private sector could do it a lot better. My point was, Yeah, we all have fights with our cell phone companies now on our cell phone bills, but no company was going to be able to do at that point what the government came in and said they were going to do. I'm not defending every government program. What I'm saying is there is a role that has been successful in the history of our country. Whether it was the phone company back then or green technology today, how do we begin to incentivize these investments that are good for the environment, that could create a whole new sector of manufacturing? How many tons of steel go into a windmill? How many thousands of component parts go into a windmill that may be made one day by three-dimensional printers and additive manufacturing? This is all starting to tie together. But while the Chinese and the Indians and other countries are making these investments, we're sitting on our hands saying, Ah, the private sector will do it.
