Obama has indulged in crony capitalism to the ruin of our American system and it cannot be tolerated if we are as a country to emerge from this mess as a capitalist country. Yet, if we do not accomplish these goals through research we are liable to be looking at the wrong side of history written in Chinese characters and we will not like what we cannot read. We have to be honest with ourselves and concede that we have an Internet partly because the government "built that" and we have a defense budget which pumps hundreds of billions of dollars every year into procurement and much into pure research.
Evidently, the question comes down to, whose research will we have, Barack Obama's or that which we need to give America the strongest military power on earth?
We cannot afford to stay out of the space race and it's going to cost billions of dollars to reenter. The whole idea of facing off against Chinese missiles with vulnerable aircraft carriers is rapidly becoming obsolete. The next war will be won, or better, the next war will be avoided, because we have spent the money and kept a decisive and recognizable edge in the technology that matters.
On the domestic side, we have got to break away from this Ponzi scheme in which we try to sustain a top heavy welfare state with programs like Social Security by flooding the country with unskilled workers. Goods and services are increasingly going to be delivered to us by robots and drones and unskilled, illiterate, politically naïve, immigrants will be a burden and not a salvation. Hence, we need a way of replacing human labor with technology. That means that technology will have to be researched and funded. Put another way, human labor is increasingly and inevitably going to be replaced by technology, how do we cope with the social consequences and remain a representative democracy committed to individual liberty?
Some of that funding will have to come from the government whether it be for domestic or for military needs. The question is how do we control it? This is a question not dissimilar from that which confronted the founding fathers when they sought to write a constitution which would permit a government which was effective and powerful in the areas where it had legitimate competency but was checked, controlled and even walled off from areas which were not legitimate, which belonged to the states or to the people, and which might lead to tyranny if the government were not controlled or the problem were not managed.
How do we keep the likes of Barack Obama from getting his hands on this money and misdirecting it while at the same time providing for the fundamental needs of a modern nation in a modern economy?
It will not do to throw money at these problems, nor will it do to stick our heads in the sand and deny all government involvement. We must solve the riddle just as the founding fathers and the framers solved the riddle with a solution that lasted until about a generation or two ago.
