Does America Need a Chief Technology Officer?
Looks like there’s going to be a new Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Huh? I didn’t even know there was such a thing. We must have had one since so much technology has been produced over the past 130 years.
The CTOs must have been in the background making sure inventors and risk takers could produce things like the following:
The cotton gin, telephone, incandescent bulb, airplane, mass produced automobiles, phonograph, typesetting machines, film cameras, film projector, video cameras, CDs, DVDs, cell phones, smart phones, laptop computers, Bluetooth, Google, desktop publishing, and a million and one other advances in technology.
Where was the current CTO when the disastrous Obamacare website was being built for $1.7 billion? Todd Park held the position when the site was proposed. “Park helped to lead the effort to fix the much maligned Obamacare portal, HealthCare.gov.” Seems to me that the Chief Technology Officer should have made sure it worked from the start.
Liberals claim that there is no place where the budget can be cut. Where there’s one Technology Officer you can bet your life that there are at least 100 people who have been hired to assist the position.
The reason the government needs a Geek squad is because the government does too much. It has its fingers into everything. There was no need for HealthCare.gov since there was no need for nationalized healthcare. The same assessment can be made for nearly everything the government does.
Let me have the budget for one week, and I’ll cut enough spending that our taxes could be lowered by 50 percent and almost nobody would know that a penny had been cut.
The irony here is that the person being picked for the position used to work for Google.
“Google Inc. (GOOG) executive Megan Smith is close to heading to the White House.
“Smith, 49, who was most recently a vice president at Google’s X lab, is a top candidate for the role of U.S. chief technology officer, according to people with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified because the process is private.
“Smith would become the third person to fill the CTO job, after Aneesh Chopra and Todd Park, who recently resigned and is returning home to California this month. Park will take on a new role for President Barack Obama’s administration as a technology adviser based in Silicon Valley, the White House said yesterday.”
Of course, this is all about politics. Deep in the bowels of the government machine discussions have taken place on how to capitalize on the technology sector for future political gain.
Once free-enterprise startups like Google make it big, they start getting involved in politics so they can protect their dominance governmentally. They become technology’s roadblock to innovation.
“The CTO serves as a kind of White House chief geek-in-residence, tasked with overseeing the government’s use of technology, including finding ways to create jobs and increase the use of broadband.”
You don’t need to be a geek to know how to create jobs. First, governments don’t create jobs. The only money a government has is the money it takes from people who work for a living. Giving that money to other people does not create jobs. If tax payers got to keep their money they could invest and spend more money, and that would create real jobs. This way, the market would know what technology was needed or wanted.
Second, entrepreneurs create jobs. Google knows this. Nearly everything Google does is free to consumers, and yet it’s a multi-billion dollar company. How do they do it since they can’t print money like the government? They weren’t restricted by government regulations.
Print media is about to go the way of rotary dial telephones and typewriters.
A Chief Technology Officer, like every other government official, will only increase the reach of the State and grow the government.