The corporations, just like our government, will look at short term returns on their investments...

(emphasis added) Didn't you just vitiate your own point?

At least corporations, however odious Marxists and other social parasites looking for handouts may consider them to be, have the virtue of being numerous. So there is some chance that between them they will try out numerous mostly stupid ideas, and maybe a few of those will work. There is only one government - it is a monopoly by definition - and it is spending somebody else's money, which makes it extra-careless, so it will at most try just a very few stupid ideas, and probably put most of the taxpayers' money into one grandly stupid but lusciously corrupt idea, for instance corn ethanol.

Now I don't know what our odds are, but how can the narrow monopoly approach possibly improve them?

Didn't you just vitiate your own point?

Nope, my point wasn't that government was better, but that the free market isn't the silver bullet that will save us. I don't think it has to be exclusively one or the other - probably a healthy mix of the two.

-Fab