"PrecisionmachinisT" wrote in message
"Jim Wilkins" wrote in message
...

The government has owned and controlled energy production since
1933:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Valley_Authority

-Still, it goes a long ways towards demonstrating that certain
-projects having the potential of providing huge benefits for all
-of society are oftentimes beyond the scope of private enterprize
-alone, the up-front costs being prohibitive.

We swing back and forth in an ad-hoc manner on public vs private
utility ownership, often after the private ones succumb to greed or
the public ones to incompetence or corruption. Both types need the
carrot plus the stick.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Bank
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_...Postal_Service

MITRE where I used to work was founded as a private corporation whose
research was almost all in the public (=military) interest.
Engineering the DEW line of radars across Canada had required a
broader range of radar + computer + communications expertise than any
one company possessed. At first MIT got the contract, spinning off
Lincoln Labs, but the workload was too great for professors part-time.

MITRE was the next attempt, on the same model as the RAND Corporation
and Sandia Labs, among many others.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND_Corporation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandia_...l_Laboratories
Not being a direct government employee has a lot of benefits such as
freedom to work on a wider range of projects, if you value adventure
over stability. Still it was a strange shadowy world.

jsw