Bold Ideas

I absolutely love this idea from Peter Smirniotopoulos at NewGeography:

There is no modern proxy for flying cars and colonies on the moon. And funding billions of dollars in support of “shovel-ready projects” will certainly do nothing to advance the cause of innovative thought about how we would like to see our current communities – urban, suburban, and exurban, and rural – evolve over the next twenty-five or fifty years. What could life be like in America in 2034 or 2059? We should not have to rely upon science fiction writers, futurists, and block-buster sci-fi movie producers to craft all of our visions of the future.

So here’s an idea for our new President. Now that everyone is relatively comfortable with the notion of spending billions (and even trillions) of dollars, let’s spend a very small portion of that on our future, rather than focusing exclusively on our near-term economic salvation. Make $10 billion available to fund five pilot projects with $2 billion each. Think of is as the “X Prize” for Innovations in Livability. Invite communities throughout the country, without restriction as to size or location, without constraints on the marketplace of ideas, to bring together their best and brightest to craft implementable proposals for how they plan to evolve their community into an exemplar for the future: Then fund the five best proposals. Take the funding decisions out of the hands of elected officials and policy makers, and place it unfettered in the hands of a blue-ribbon panel of experts from a broad range of disciplines.

As a conservative I am supposed to scoff at pie-in-the-sky ideas like using billions of government-supplied dollars to encourage innovation. The market is supposed to do it, so the logic goes. Capitalism is the greatest innovator, I’m supposed to say. But sometimes the government has to be the engine, even if it allows others to steer. This project, as suggested by Smirniotopoulos, would allow that to happen. Given the capability I know exists within the American spirit the return on an investment like this will be tenfold.

If there’s one thing liberals are blessed with that we conservatives often lack it’s optimism. Smirniotopoulos’ idea embodies that. Conservatives would do well to grab a little bit of it.