Where's my flying car?

As the new year approaches, it is only natural for people to both look to the past and look to the future, and guessing where ourselves and this year will fit in the long term. In fact, I am reading one of my old science-fiction pulp magazines from around the mid 1950s, and some of the guesses they had for our own time. Boasting of the wonders of the 2010s, it tells the intrepid readers how in sixty years time, we’d be traveling in flying cars, have robots taking care of menial labor, our kids would be educated by televisions, and the family could vacation top Europe by the evening bullet train, or maybe take the commercial rocket to a resort on the moon, with ‘beach houses’ on the Sea of Tranquility.

While this scale of predictions may seem charmingly naive to the contemporary viewer, take a moment to view those predictions through the rose colored glasses of that 1950s pulp magazine. My grandfather was coming of age around this time, and what a time it must have been to be growing up. Compared to his grandfather who grew up in an age of horses and telegraphs, or even his father who struggled through the depression, it must have been a difference of night and day. White collar jobs and college educations were increasingly achievable for citizens of all walks of life, whereas before a future as a farmhand or factory worker awaited them. Interstates had finally secured the place of the automobile in the heart of the American consciousness, and from there rose the suburb, which gave rise to the modern ideal of home ownership. In that home, you would see televisions, radios, ovens, refrigerators, air conditioning, and countless wonders that a generation before had been toys for the rich, and a generation earlier tenants of science fiction, were now features in the home of every American. As my mother was growing up as a child, he saw the advent of the space age, and the entire world waited with baited breath as Neil Armstrong took one giant leap for all mankind onto the surface of the moon. Even diseases like Polio or Smallpox, which had killed or crippled millions even a generation before, were now being beaten back with commercial vaccines developed not even a decade prior. So it makes sense that there was a great deal of optimism about the future, and that maybe an age of flying cars and lunar beach houses, or maybe free from suffering or disease, may not be just a dream, but a future to be had for his progeny.

Yet somewhere along the line, that brisk pace of innovation vanished. Few new job fields have emerged in the last few decades. In sixty years, ascetics aside, the design of the car has changed very little, and the Interstates were our last major national infrastructural program. The American home, or what homes have not been foreclosed, has changed just as little in that period, and while the televisions and radios and refrigerators have grown sleeker or smarter, few new wonders have joined them. After years wasted on sub-orbital space stations and probes, NASA itself looks to be shut down, forty years after that giant leap for mankind, without even another lunar mission since Apollo 17, let alone a beach house on the moon. Whereas prior generations saw smallpox eradicated and the polio wards closed, all the quilts and marathons over the years have brought us no closer to a cure for cancer or AIDS. Whereas in my grandfather’s time dreamt that we may have flying cars by 2011, today we would be happy if GM’s latest traditional model wasn’t subsidized with our tax dollars.

If there was one major area of innovation since my grandfather’s time, it would be computers. No one could have understood in the 1950s that the massive vacuum-tube filled room-sized calculators like ENIAC would pave the way to handheld telephones more powerful than the Apollo Landers, and with computers, came the Internet, one of the main constructs of the modern world. Yet why has the so-labeled technology sector thrived while so many other sectors of the economy have stagnated or suffered?

The answer is simple: the computer industry and the Internet are largely unregulated by the government, and despite SOPA and other legislative efforts, it is unlike so many other industries from manufacturing to nuclear power, in that the market, not the government, has the majority say over what comes from the industry. While this does end up with a few dozen fiascos like Pets.com, it also results in men like Bill Gates going from high school dropouts in their parents garage tinkering, to the CEO of Microsoft and the richest man in the modern world. For the reason for the large scale stagnation of so many other industries, look no further then government red tape.

To use one of my prior examples, lets look at the pharmaceutical industry. When Jonas Salk invented the polio vaccine back in the 1950s, he went from experimentation to commercial release to the utter elimination of the polio virus in the United States in less then a decade. Today, the virus itself is on the brink of joining smallpox in extinction, with the haunting sight of children locked in iron lungs in polio wards left for the history books.

Could you see the FDA let such a wide scale program happen, at least without an additional decade’s worth of redundant experimentation taking place, and then prohibiting a mass vaccine drive for public safety? As a result, we have half a dozen drugs for treating erectile dysfunction or acne because they are deemed more commercially viable then a cure for cancer - and after having the government tie their hands in every way they can, they’re right!

For that matter take a look at our energy sector. Oil drilling is regulated and opposed from ANWAR to the Keystone pipeline due to objections from the EPA, due to some vaguely explained negative impact oil drilling would have on nature, never mind the fact oil drilling also creates much needed jobs and economic growth. Of course, environmental reasons are also why we haven’t built new nuclear plant in decades, wind turbines and solar plants are proclaimed to be hostile to wild life, while hydroelectric dams are dubbed destructive to nature, leaving the green energy sources just as EPA-disavowed at oil drilling.

For laughs, lets look at my often mentioned flying car, which much to my surprise, do exist. Problem is, despite several patented designs and even a half dozen prototype models, they will likely never see a floor showroom due to safety concerns from the DOT, followed by years of wrangling over whether the flying car would have to follow DMV or FAA regulations, or knowing our government‘s bureaucrats, both, along with a newly created Regulatory Commission for Flying Cars.

Overbearing regulation and bureaucracy is stagnating our economy and our society. Our founding fathers knew the dangers of a bureaucracy - that’s one reason why have a Constitution that barely numbers more then ten pages while our tax code that has single volumes go into the tens of thousands. Whereas a man with an idea or a product could once take that idea and wring all he could from it, whether that idea be the drive through hamburger or the personal computer, now the citizenry is held accountable to a hundred increasingly large acronym-laded agencies of all types, leaving the market place increasingly hostile to both new ideas, products and people, and increasingly difficult for the people already there to stay afloat.

While a little of regulation is needed, it should be there as to act as a safety net for the market and the consumer, not a noose to hang them both with. To get our economy and our society, trimming the government red tape is just as important to America as getting the budget out of the red. In doing so we create a climate more hospitable to the inventor or the venture capitalist, who in turn will create jobs and goods for the consumer that improve the qualities of life for everybody in ways a bureaucrat can only dream.

And who knows? Maybe we’ll finally get those ideas flying cars off the ground.