Innovation

Necessity is the mother of invention. We hope economic downturns will spurn innovative thinking and ingenious solutions. Stimulus programs tend to supply shovels rather than environs conductive to creative thought. This is why FDR got artists, writers and poets involved in the WPA. Roosevelt also surrounded himself with great minds from outside of Washington D.C., then called brain trusts, they evolved into what we now refer to as think tanks. President Obama has too many Washington insiders around him, he mistakenly looks to the GOP for ideas, advice and help. For all his education Barak Obama is a cultural neophyte. What is needed in this country far more than an insurance exchange is an unfettered exchange of ideas free of politics and polarizing angry language.

Ideas will bubble up from the unemployed. Losing cushy jobs often causes a mad scramble toward entrepreneurship. Engineers, programmers and scientific types bang away in garages, warehouses and lonely bedrooms seeking to become the next Bill Gates. There's no lack of intellectual property or interesting ideas out there, just a dearth of money to make them happen.

Wealthy venture capitalists got burned during the dot.com bubble. They dumped billions into wacky internet ideas only to see the crafty marketers go public and sell out before the bubble burst. All investors were left holding the bag. Those wealthy individuals and institutions took their money out of innovation and put it into wealth enhancement. Slick hedge fund managers and magician bankers were put in charge of conjuring dollars out of thin air. Nothing of substance was produced. The touted world economy took a huge sucker punch, almost a knockout blow. Lots of wealth disappeared, more of it headed toward the sidelines to wait for the next easy money scheme. As a result invention is stifled and innovative production is held at rest for the lack of money.

A big gripe of the angry American mob is that government only knows to spend, it never invests or saves for the future. Bush wanted taxpayers to invest their dollars in order to privatize Social Security. If this huge trust fund had wisely and conservatively invested even a portion of the capital accrued since 1935 old folks would be sitting pretty and we would not be having this health care discussion because universal care would have happened in the 50's using the abundance of wealth made available by a well managed trust.

The post office should make money just like UPS and Fed Ex. Our huge military could police the entire planet for a fee. The government holds the rights to intellectual properties, distribution networks and information technologies that could serve the world well and profitably. Yet we still prefer the deficit model, mortgage our futures to foreign governments and prop up wealthy individuals and institutions with outmoded, silly supply side ideas. Even the most rudimentary Reaganism supposed the dispersal of wealth through a trickle down mechanism. Today the world economy has huge clouds of wealth that blows from market to market and exists in a rarified, ethereal plane. Sprinkles of wealth never reach the ground. Government needs to seed the money clouds and direct the rain of investment toward fertile minds.