My local NPR radio station, WNYC FM in New York, just had an interview with New Gingrich on his new book "The Contract with the Earth" on the Brian Lehrer Show. With a typical liberal's urge to listen to people even if I disagree with them most of the time, I decided to give him a listen.
I lasted about three minutes before switching off in disgust.
Mr. Gingrich lead off his discussion with some of his environmenal credentials, which were slightly more impressive than I expected. Most important, he said that although the greenhouse gas theory of global warming was not 100% proven, a "real Conservative" has to play it safe, and reducing greenhouse gasses is most likely a good idea. He wants to make it easier for garage inventors and small entrepreneurs to innovate without having to deal with Big Government regulations and bureaucracy.
Sounds fairly reasonable so far, doesn't it? Then he gave an example, which he presumably thinks is one of his best ideas: The government should give a billion (with a "B") dollar prize to the inventor of a practical, manufacturable, marketable hydrogen engine.
Newt, such engines already exist. Fuel cells, which are being improved every day, may be a better solution. The problem with hydrogen is not inventing a better engine, the problems are storage, distribution, and getting the freaking hydrogen in the first place. It doesn't grow on trees, and you can't dig it up out of the ground. But let this pass.
The reason Newt's idea is so brilliant (in his humble opinion) is that the inventor would rather have the billion dollar prize tax free (tax free!, mind you, which makes the money twice as desirable) than go through the burdensome process of "filling out thousands of government forms". Apparently, Newt thinks this is a better idea than the good old patent-and-free-market idea that was written into the Constitution.
The only "government forms and regulations" an inventor has to fill out and comply with are the patents applications, which, it's true are pretty burdensome, (and expensive) to fill out and file. Actual manufacturers have more regulations to comply with, and whether Conservatives like Newt would be successful in gutting rationalizing them is an entirely different question.
The questions I couldn't stand to listen long enough to get answered was these: Who judges whether the invention is really worth a billion dollars? If the award goes to Halliburton, and the invention turns out to be worthless in practice, will they have to give the money back?
And who would own the patent once the government paid a billion dollars for it? If the government does, what is to stop them from licensing it only to favored (read "generous") manufacturers and cutting out ones who don't contribute sufficiently to the party in power?
And Newt, isn't government ownership of intellectual property...socialism?