Media Stupidities. I. The 'Innovation Tax!'

The other day I was watching the program Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN. Now generally Mr Zakaria doesn't say incredibly stupid things; in fact, he readily admitted the old traditional jobs are not coming back to America, as opposed to those mouthing idiocies like "American workers are best"; "American companies are going to hire soon" - yes, but in India, China & Mexico. That was fine. But it was the solutions he proposed that amazed me. They were not only ineffective, but seemed Mr Zakaria was clueless about some realities.
So his first solution was learn a new language, like Chinese. Now apart from the fact that Chinese is a very difficult language to learn & master (I've heard even for the Chinese!)- I doubt very much there is a huge need for Chinese-speaking people in America. For one thing, international commerce is pretty complex, someone with say 1 year of beginning Chinese will hardly qualify to act as a language specialist. Secondly, many business processes have become so computerized that language issues are not that relevant anymore. And finally, there are enough Chinese who know reasonable English, since English nowadays is taught at high school level in most countries. So whom would you hire if you are doing business in China - someone who is a native Chinese speaker, knows Chinese culture & has learnt English at the high school level (& is cheaper to hire), or somebody who decided to learn Chinese just last year & may have never even set foor in China?
But the most bizarre of his suggestion was an 'Innovation Tax' to promote innovation in America! Now that would be popular, a new tax! It would have been hilarious except he was dead serious. Now as far as I know the Industrial Revolution didn't need an innovation tax. Nor did Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, or the explosion of software development in India. Innovators are a special breed. They don't need government inducements.
And how exactly will this Innovation tax work? Ah, more money for research & development. After all, so much of innovation came from DARPA, from NASA, from Government-funded research during World War II, & so on.
It would be a convincing argument except there is plenty of research money given out, the problem is how much of it will result in innovation. Undoubtedly, more research money helps unearth more knowledge, but in most cases doesn't result in commercial products. And R & D funding goes largely into academia, where university professors are more ineterested in expanding pure human knowledge & can't care less whether it would ave any commercial value. In fact, some university researchers regard only basic research as befitting academia & consider technologically-oriented research as glorified assembly-line work. On top of that, if research money is increased, most of the times the experienced professors who are already well-funded & their minions get most of the money, while new researchers, especially those into new ways of thinking get nothing - they don't have enough preliminary data, or they are not well-connected, or their project is a 'fishing expedition' (a favorite phrase of review committees), meaning the outcome is too uncertain. Hmmm, I wonder where innovative ideas will end up. Undoubtedly, some of the early research was critical in understanding molecular mechanisms & developing genetic technologies; but even then only a small percentage of government-funded reesearch has resulted in actual product development. Like, the mainstay of cancer treatment (despite all the publicity of wonder drugs, most of which actually have pretty modest benefits) is still traditional chemotherpay & radiotherapy. At this point we have enough knowledge for innovation, more research money would only have researchers figuring out rat psychology or zebrafish development which won't have anything to do with human disease & development of innovative medical products. World War II was a very different situation. There was a confluence of superb scientists, an overwhelming urgency to develop better war technolgies, & of course government funding.(The only similar situation was AIDS research, which thanks to the AIDS activists was focused on drug development rather than too much basic research. But there aren't that many situations with such urgency).
I guess Mr Zakaria thinks you can engineer innovation through funding. Maybe he believes every piece of research results in some wonder drug or better machine, therefore putting more research money will guarantee commercial benefits (again, I have no doubt more research money will result in more information, the point is how much if that is useful in the market place & how much is pointless pile of data). In all likelihood, though, an innovation tax will enrage Americans, spend most of the money in administrative costs, & provide more money to aging but influential professors. The innovators of the world will innovate no matter what & maybe, the best way of promoting that is for the government to step aside, to reduce red tape & regulations, rather than tryin to induce it.