<< I don't see anything in your comments that could help us compete with India and Europe on ground breaking physics research. >>
Who says we must?
Americans -- of every etnicity -- already vanguard the world's scientists, chemists, pharmacists, physicists, engineers, creators, innovators, producers and industrialists -- have for two hundred years -- and have no real challengers in sight.
And the only "challenge" comes from self-deluding dead and decadent Euro-peons, whose Neo-Soviet is already coming apart around their ears and whose soon-to-be-ghastly collapse will occupy them for at least the next fifteen years? Or is, you say, being mounted by various of the planet's third-world Hell-hole states -- most of which haven't yet figgured out how to form a government acceptable to their populations and/or still build the 1948 Morris Oxfords they call "automobiles?" These will "challenge" our superiority in every field of Human endeavor? Those states that are -- if they're lucky -- struggling to catch up to being within thirty years behind us -- and/or to get hundreds of millions of their subjects out of the middle ages-like poverty and serfdom and squalor in which they subsist?
Dream on.
I'd like to remind you about Nagasaki and Hiroshima. I'd like to remind you about the Norton Bomb sight, and the strategic bomber. I'd also like to point out that game theory, research produced by von Neumann, actually helped us win WWII. In fact, without it, we might have lost. When the Japanese were trying to understand what had happened to them at the end of WWII, one of the generals complained that they had relied too much on spirit and not enough on science and engineering.
I don't mind that you disagree with me, but I'm just pointing out that there are dangers in trying to do without massive infrastructure spending on development in space and physical sciences research. That spending put us ahead for WWII, and it put us ahead during the Cold War. We'll need to stay ahead of the Chinese and Europeans if we want to maintain strategic superiority.
If you've got other ideas about how to encourage (or simply allow) private industry to enter into these fields and stay ahead of the EU and China, then let's hear it.
Americans -- of every etnicity -- already vanguard the world's scientists, chemists, pharmacists, physicists, engineers, creators, innovators, producers and industrialists -- have for two hundred years -- and have no real challengers in sight.
I don't know what "etnicity" has to do with it, but I think it's dangerous to assume that a lead we had in the 1950s translates into a permanent lead. That lead was obtained through a massive investment of federal research and development spending that launched private industry and government labs to very high levels of achievement.
We won the cold war partly with capitalism-fueld federal spending on space and weapons research.