In this week’s “It’s Debatable” segment, Rick Rosen and Charles Moster debate if the federal government could enact one major innovation to improve people’s lives, what would it be? Rosen retired as a professor from the Texas Tech University School of Law and is a retired U.S. Army colonel. Moster is founder of the Moster Law Firm based in Lubbock with seven offices including Austin, Dallas, and Houston.
MOSTER – 1
We are a nation distracted by international challenges which have drained our resources and treasury. It is easy to forget that the primary duty of government is to promote the general welfare of its people, which was recognized at the very founding of our republic.
John Adams poignantly stated this principle: “It shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates in all future periods to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences… and to encourage private societies and public institutions, rewards and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and the natural history of the country.”
I came across the above quote while recently reading the Pulitzer Prize winning biography, John Adams, by David McCullough, and found it to be extremely interesting, particularly the reference to the use of “rewards” to promote the arts, sciences, and other areas. I had never thought of this possibility before and was unaware that John Adams had opined as to this subject at all.
I think John Adams was on to something and will embrace this concept as to my recommendation for the legislative act which would most improve people’s lives.
I would propose that the Congress pass a law which establishes a national prize akin to the Nobel Peace Prize which honors and provides a substantial monetary award to individuals in key areas including medicine, arts, and literature. Apart from recognizing the achievements of the winners, the Nobel Foundation hands out an award of $986,000.
My idea is to amplify Adams’ notion that a reward be used to promote the arts and sciences. For lack of a better name, I would establish the “American Annual Innovation Award” to promote and recognize American citizens who achieve the greatest accomplishment in promoting the humanitarian advancement in two critical areas – medicine and technology. Now hold your breath, as I would increase the prize award to $1 Billion each and also allow corporations in addition to individuals to compete for this honor and the cash.
The reason behind the massive prize and its limitation to two basic areas is to create a huge incentive for individuals or entities to develop and promote medical treatments and technologies which will buck the status quo and not otherwise be developed given the lack of profit incentive by existing mega corporations.
There are many examples to illustrate my point. I know from my own experience as an IP lawyer that it is virtually impossible to invent therapies for effective cancer treatment. Many years ago, I represented a brilliant doctor who invented an entirely new way to treat invasive cancers which would have replaced chemotherapy. My firm handled the patent work but could not have anticipated the incredible resistance of the hospital community and particularly the chemo/pharmaceutical industry which used all of its power to prefer profit over people. My client was forced from his hospital position and driven to the point of insolvency. Tragically, this amazing medical innovation never saw the light of day.
The point is that corporations in the medical field will always resist innovations which could undermine their market share. Consequently, there has been little progress in curing the major diseases which still haunt all of us such as cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s, particularly for seniors.
Although our lifespans have increased, it has only been incremental.
The import of an award of the American Annual Innovation Award in the area of medicine would be to provide a gargantuan monetary incentive to bring paradigm shifting medical technologies to the fore which would benefit not only Americans but the entire world.
An award of this magnitude would break the chain which has held back innovation in the name of profits. Moreover, it would incentivize business startups to configure and launch research efforts with the very real promise of not only gaining notoriety but an enormous return on their investment and access to the marketplace.
Moreover, the prize would also motivate research in areas which would not ordinarily provide an economic incentive for development, for example, a cure for diseases which do not affect a large number of people. The financial incentive would still be there.
An award for technology would also allow for the development of new systems which would extend innovation to the masses without the need for immediate
profit. For example, new sources of energy or even – dare I say – free energy – would never be developed by large corporations as it would result in economic suicide. A perfect example is what happened to Nikola Tesla and his efforts to invent the free transmission of electrical power via transmitters. Although he developed the technology, he was destroyed economically and emotionally by the huge industrialists at the time including Thomas Edison who, contrary to popular belief, was not a nice guy.
And so – I propose the “American Annual Innovation Award” as my candidate for the best innovation to be passed by the Congress.
ROSEN – 1
Charles’ proposed American Annual Innovation Award is a wonderful idea and would unquestionably improve people’s lives. There is, however, a fly in the ointment: the means to pay for it. The nation is facing a fiscal crisis from which it may never recover. My recommended innovation is the election of a Congress and President with the courage, integrity, and intelligence to reverse our race towards fiscal Armageddon. Importantly, the national debt crisis is bipartisan—the result of decades of profligate and sometimes foolish spending by both parties.
As I type this sentence, the US debt exceeded $33,715,681,000,000 (because it increases so rapidly and I type so slowly, it was difficult to record an accurate number). This amount currently translates to roughly $100,000 per person and $260,000 per taxpayer in the country. Moreover, according to Marketwatch, the national debt will increase $5.2 billion every single day for the next decade and will reach $50 trillion by 2033. Bloomberg estimates that the annual interest paid on the debt crossed $1 trillion dollars in October, exceeding by $150 billion the 2024 defense budget. And on November 10, Moody’s Investor Services “changed the outlook on US ratings to negative from stable,” raising a possible downgrade of US debt “without effective fiscal policy measures to reduce government spending or increase revenues.”
The American people deserve strong presidential leadership and a Congress willing to address and greatly reduce the debt. Instead, the people get partisan bickering. For example, immediately following the release of Moody’s report, the White House stated that “Moody’s decision to change the U.S. outlook is yet another consequence of Congressional Republican extremism and dysfunction.” What mendacious rubbish! Our debt crisis did not just arise in January 2023 when
the Republicans took narrow control of one house of Congress. This kind of silliness must end.
New York City displays two “doomsday” clocks: A Climate Clock counting “down the critical time window to reach zero emissions,” and a US Debt Clock tracking the federal debt. Only the Debt Clock is factual since climate predictions have been inconsistent and malleable for at least a half century. If the US fails to tackle its debt crisis, the Climate Clock may not make a difference—at least for this nation.
(PS: Since I began writing this column just over two hours ago, the national debt has increased by about a quarter of a billion dollars.)
MOSTER – 2
Rick has a point that there is an exceedingly expensive “white elephant” in my idea ointment. However, the country has always forged ahead even when the cost has been a concern.
An example would be the Apollo moon mission which resulted in a total expenditure of $25.8 Billion or $257 Billion in today’s dollars. As many readers will recall, there was considerable opposition at the time given the expense and also the compelling nature of other competing social priorities. That said, our nation fulfilled the promise first articulated by JKF and landed the first man on the July 21, 1969.
Critically, the return on investment to our nation was $8.00 for every dollar spent on the Apollo program which would translate into over $2 Trillion dollars in 2023 dollars. Now, that’s incredible.
So, what Rick is overlooking in his rejoinder is the tremendous ROI which will only inure to the financial benefit of American industry and everyone of else.
An equally salient benefit is the ROI to our wellbeing and the environment which is beyond financial measure. The reason why I set forth categories in technology and medicine is to earmark the largest benefit for the buck. In my many articles and books, I have written about the failure of American business and government to undergo R&D in computer sectors which are not mainstream particularly in an area known as biocomputers or wetware. These computers are not based on silicon cells and circuitry, but laboratory grown neurons which were first utilized by a
little-known scientist out of the Georgia institute of Technology in 1999 – Bill Ditto. He miraculously extracted and interconnected a few leech neurons and got them to perform simple numbers calculations. Fast forward 23 years and there is at least one startup in California which has expanded on this technology by hooking up 80 rodent neurons to power a bomb sniffing biocomputer purchased by the Department of Defense.
I know this sounds scary to the uninitiated but biocomputers are the wave of the future and are being developed vigorously by our enemies at lightning speed and larger combinations of neurons which will approximate or exceed human intelligence. In my book, Midnight at Mount Vernon – the Cyber-Surrender of the USA (Amazon Books – 2019), I predicted that whatever nation develops this technology first will also acquire military superiority centuries ahead of us. Our touted stealth technology and missile defenses would have the effect of bows and arrows to our hyper-advanced adversaries. I am dead serious about that.
Notwithstanding calls from myself and others to launch a crash development program to develop biocomputers akin to the Manhattan Project, no one in Washington is listening. I am hopeful that my proposed American Annual Innovation Award would spark interest in the creation of new computer technologies such as biocomputers which would not only benefit all Americans but secure our security needs. The takeaway is that the award will spur interest from developers outside the box who are not beholden to the invested military and industrial complex.
The award would also spearhead deliverables to improve our environment from a technological standpoint which is not a priority of importance to embedded industries such as oil and gas and the traditional energy sector. As Nikola Tesla experienced, these industries are ruthless and will actually destroy competitors or buy up the patents of competing technologies, so they never see the light of day. As an IP attorney, I have witnessed these ruthless acts. Once again, the award would incentivize inventors to develop new processes which would potentially address all of our environmental concerns including global warming.
Finally, the award in medicine would have benefits beyond any economic measure. What price would Rick put on curing the scourge of cancer once and for all. 609,360 American died from cancer in 2022. I lost my mother decades earlier from this horrific disease. I can easily imagine a brilliant researcher in the next few years accepting the Annual American Innovation Award for discovering a cure for cancer. I cannot imagine a great achievement for America and all humankind. Can you?
What price would Rick put on that?
I have come up with a simple and compelling idea which could remake this country and all of us. Let’s move forward on it!
ROSEN 2
I support Charles’ proposed innovation; however, the issue before us is to identify one major federal government innovation to improve people’s lives. My vision for improving people’s lives differs from Charles’: an appropriations process that effectively resolves the nation’s existential fiscal crisis. Without such a process, Charles’ vision cannot be achieved; indeed, our country may not survive.
In a May 2023 report, the GAO stated: “The federal government faces an unsustainable fiscal future. If policies don’t change, debt will continue to grow faster than the economy.” Specifically, it found that large annual budget deficits drive debt growth, and interest costs will make up larger shares of total spending.
The focus of government spending must be solely on those undertakings that only a national government can accomplish. For example, one half of Congress’ constitutionally enumerated powers deal directly or indirectly with national defense. The nation faces grave military threats from China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran, and the armed forces require all the funding necessary to meet these threats.
Congress has a duty to return to a budget process that ensures expenditures do not exceed revenues. Some members of Congress apparently believe that the absence of spending increases in pet appropriations is a “spending decrease.” This view makes no sense except to account for the inflation these members cause by their reckless deficit spending. Congress must eliminate earmarks, rescind industry subsidies, streamline regulatory processes to enable the growth of private enterprise, raise the retirement age for Social Security and Medicare, and abolish or reduce the size of needless federal agencies. Congress should also employ revenue increases, but with care to ensure that taxes do not stifle economic growth.
My idea of innovation may be different, but it is an imperative. Some members of Congress appreciate the nation’s financial straits, but most seemingly do not. They are either hopelessly obtuse or excessively obsessed with avoiding tough spending decisions to ensure reelection. Scottish advocate, judge, historian, and University of Edinburgh professor Alexander Fraser Tytler (Lord Woodhouselee) purportedly
observed over 200 years ago: “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.” Regardless of who actually wrote the passage, it is certainly prescient, and the country is perilously close to its tipping point today.