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| Photo Credit: chailey |
In the early days of the Solyndra debacle,
as the reality dawned on the White House that its half-billion-dollar
investment was about to go belly-up, former Obama economic adviser Larry
Summers famously observed that, "Government is a lousy venture
capitalist."
The quip,
discovered after House Republicans subpoenaed White House e-mails about
Solyndra, fairly well characterizes good Washington opinion these days
in the wake of the Solyndra bankruptcy. But before we conclude that
government ought to get out of the business of betting on new
technologies, we'd do well to try imagining our modern economy without
computers, the Internet and jet travel, all of which were heavily subsidized by the federal government.
Critics
of government investment in technology cherry-pick high-profile
failures such as Solyndra, the 1970s "synfuels" program to make gasoline
out of coal, and corn ethanol. But these relatively marginal failures pale in comparison to the long history of successful government investments that have transformed our economy and contributed mightily to our affluence over the last century. READ MORE
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