- Ballmer sounds like an unpatriotic ass. Perhaps /I'm wrong and he's a really nice guy, but not in this article. He's turning his back on the country that gave Ballmer opportunity to be where he is today. Industrialist Carnegie came from Scotland and loved the U.S., and maintained loyalty until his death. He would have never entertained the idea of moving factories to China for cheap labor.

- Raising corporat taxes doesn't affect the consumer as badly as you believe. Yes some prices get raised, but increased taxation also leads to more cuts internally like plastic desks instead of mahogany, fewer free trips to Vegas, snd so on.

Ahh patriotism, socialism, and economic ignorance. These great ideas could come together to form a new poltical party. Perhaps it could be called the National Socialist party!!

As a more concrete example, if we paid only for what we used, there would be no interstate highway systems.

Hi, your post must have gone to the wrong dimension. In my dimension this page exists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_highway

I guess you have a government internet connection ;)

Capitalism made it what it is today, if they had kept at it it would be like a Soviet car today.

What about the CD and DVD, or the thousands of other standardized products?

Generally companies supply what is demanded by customers, not by elitists. What average customer gives a flying hoot about IMAP if they are happy with webmail, or whether one protocol is a bit better than another? Companies have to make a profit, otherwise they go out of business so why the hell should they spend lots of money changing all their systems just because some academics thinks a new protocol is 30% faster. They actually need need a return on the money spent, unlike government which can waste all the money it wants and never go out of business (it doesn't need to cater to real people either.)

Anyway, I suspect IMAP and newsgroups haven't got replaced, its just that new users find webmail and phpbb easier to use.

Special interests can target their approach.

Everyone else gets to choose between a couple of quacks and then vote for said ignorant quack once every few years - I guess that is the will of the majority bit.

Maybe

Somehow I think Intel will be able to spend a billion a bit better than the EU government. They don't have a great track record with the common agricultural policy etc

Oh, so that's why the GDP per capita is fairly low I guess.

You're right, but his "solutions" didn't sound that convincing, the Austrians seem more consistent. Also, how is any of the other economics "testable" it's impossible to isolate two experiments like you can with physics. You can't split off two realities and test each one. And even if you could split off two realities you couldn't control each one like in a physics experiment. Claiming an economics experient is testable is nothing more than words.

Just my 2 dollars.

Other sciences reject empirical methods, are they crazy too? It's a human science, it isn't physics!!

I keep getting sucked in by this argument and then it dawns on me that more time on this petite thing is less time spent on more important things as to whether these bailouts should have happened at all. This is simply an unintended consequence of bad policy.

A war and a depression... Go Keynes!!!

I would argue that they shouldn't release it with any browsers default installed and instead give them a package manager (similar to many Linux distributions) that allows them to step through a wizard process to download browsers from trusted sources based on an ever changing list (or conf file if they really want to change that).

Why just the browser, why not solitaire, why not the calculator? And if we take that logic to its conclusion would there wouldn't even be a desktop (or windows!), it's the thin end of the wedge. The EU should just stop bullying, this isn't rocket sciences it is just common sense.

212,000 jobs could be created by this plan

Great! But that's a useless figure if they don't say how many will be lost in productive sectors of the economy. Government only moves money about, spilling some on the way...

that it is a welfare program for scientists.

Assuming that market forces are going to work all the time is what got us into the current meltdown of both the economy as well as the internet hardware.

No, the current meltdown is due to central planning and then calling that central planning the market. If you have a central bank on one side putting interest rates down to 1% in early 2000 and then on the other hand deregulating some bits and on top of that encouraging people to buy houses they can't afford you have a recipe for disaster. Thinking the market is powerful enolugh that it won't get distorted is wishful thinking, presumably what Greenspan deluded himself into thinking. So, in that sense I aggree with you.

It's pretty damn hard to have sane central planning---it is politics, it will always be political.