And we question and debate every dollar of that spending (especially the stadium development because it's pretty easy to see that as the city giving money to the local billionaire playboy with an ego problem). Protection of intellectual media falls under the government's protection of private poperty rights, which is one of the primary reasons people form a government voluntarily (as opposed to waking up and finding there's a new ruling class of warrior kings demanding taxes, replacing the deposed warrior kings). The government makes money on the airwave licensing, and subsidizing movie shoots probably will certainly never appear in a campaign ad by either party (George Lucas needs your tax dollars because he's not rich enough!)
So shouldn't we question whether the discovery of a fundamental building block of the universe and verifying a major element of the Standard Model of physics is worth $9 billion dollars (the total cost of the supercollider)?
That's an amount slightly more than we spent on the innovative Commanche stealth helicoper, both prototypes of which were sweet, if a bit buggy.
That's a billion more (adjusting for inflation) than we spent on the Navy A-12 Stealth Dorito, which added to advances in accounting, litigation, and plywood mockups. It also gave us a non-afterburning variant of the GE F404 engine, so if we wanted to bulid a subsonic F-18, we could!
CERN cost almost as much as we spent on the Crusader self-propelled artillery system (well, $2 billion short), the prototype of which decorates a park in Fort Sill. Don't you think we should spend more on parks? Besides, think of the commercial spinoffs it might generate. An automated way to use millions of dollars in robotics to shove a cartridge into a breech!
For the amount spent on CERN, we could probably add another module to the ISS to do MRI scans of astronauts as they puke. I, for one, would love to see a real-time MRI of a Snickers bar floating in an astronaut's stomach. That would be real research.
Instead we blow money on labs like CERN, whose employees fiddle around and invent things like posting picture on the Internet. How the frack can anyone in society make money posting pictures of girls on the Internet? It's not like everybody can't just wander down to the mall and see girls in real life. It's not like the pictures could be viewed fast enough to appear to move (Although it woul be cool if someone could develop a way to view streaming pictures with a computer).
I posted to original CERN Internet photo above, and I don't see why anyone would view it. Posting Photos is Not. Going. To. Catch. On.
The public has wasted several billion on CERN and their crazy ideas about of computer networking (World Wide Web? Bwuhahaha! Idiocy), but mark my words, the private sector will never recoup a dime.
