Well, I was watching the special Fareed Zakaria GPS this weekend where Fareed talked to four successful CEOs (three current, one former) to solicit their opinions on the economy and their ideas on how to fix it.
Eric Schmidt, whom you may know runs a mildly successful enterprise called Google (If you don't know what that is, I would suggest you google it), said this (while arguing for more government involvement):
People assume that somehow America's government was not involved in the world fifty years ago; almost all of the science and technology research that we take for granted now* came out of the Defense Department spending post World War II.
At that point, Fareed pointed out of some examples:
1. semi-conductor industry (D.O.D. project)
2. internet (DARPA project)
3. computer industry (NASA was main client during it's formative years)
4. GPS (D.O.D. project)
As I listened to their conversation, I couldn't help but think of a friend who - while not necessarily self-identifying as a teabagger - opined that "government screws up everything it tries to do".
While it would be truly naive to argue that government gets everything right, it is nevertheless a startlingly uninformed opinion to somehow suggest that an unregulated private sector is inherently "better" than the alternative. I pointed out to my friend that the V.A. scores better than the private sector in patient satisfaction. His response was (more or less) "uhhhh... I don't believe that"... like it was just a matter of my opinion rather than the result of polling data.
And then there are Teabagger politicians (specifically Sharron Angle and Ken Buck - both losers in their elections of course) who voiced an interest in privatizing the V.A. until veterans groups howled - then lied about their previous position. If teabaggers are so confident in the sanctity of their free-market ideology... why do they back down?
* NOTE: I couldn't decipher exactly what phrase he used here.
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