I hope this series is good work, but it is in the half-hour medium, which is limited to a kind of mediocrity that sponsors are just dying to have right now, and the public, for some reason, is unconsciously demanding.
One of the good things about the public Human Genome Project is that the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health spent a part of their budget on the ethical, legal, and social implications of their research.
It is in the public interest to know what our governors are up to. If they are up to doing good, then they are only too happy to let us know. When they are up to no good, they want that kept secret.
I recognized that information was, in many respects, like a public good, and it was this insight that made it clear to me that it was unlikely that the private market would provide efficient resource allocations whenever information was endogenous.
I knew you had to go in and audition and maybe they'd hire you, and that's where you start. I had a good understanding about press: that it's the actor's responsibility to publicize his or her films.
And if we make the process political, if we start to make it personal, we're actually going to frustrate good public policy, in terms of managing this money.
I was always complaining that there weren't enough good people going into public service, so I figured I had to get behind someone I found so compelling.
If you talk to most businessmen, they'll say that what they do is for the public good, but you know they're just greedy, and consumers are just consuming for the sake of their own greed.
Cricket is just something that I am good at, just like various people are good at various things. What's lucky is that cricket gets enormous publicity.
America is strong because its journalism is strong. That's how democracies work. They're only as good as the quality of the information that the public possesses. And that is where we come in.
National security laws must protect national security. But they must also protect the public trust and preserve the ability of an informed electorate to hold its government to account.
Public employee unions, in their defense, say politicians have unfairly made them into simplistic bogeymen, responsible for problems that have myriad causes. Not all government workers receive generous pensions, they note.
I believe that government should confine itself to the public realm and that it should be as stripped down as possible, within reason. It should not be burdened by excess bureaucracy.
There's nothing wrong with talking out loud in public, but there is something wrong with the government sucking up all those utter instances in a database just in case they maybe want to bust you in five years.
We need a government which, yes, guarantees basic standards in public services, but which also steps in to protect people's wellbeing as they take part in our consumer democracy - particularly online.
I don't think that voters should be fixated on public policy. In a healthy republic, they wouldn't have to worry every waking hour about what their government is doing.
They have seized upon the government by bribery and corruption. They have made speculation and public robbery a science. They have loaded the nation, the state, the county, and the city with debt.
Aside from the poor example it sets, the federal government enables reckless spending on public-employee pensions by offering hope of assistance from Washington if things get bad enough.
My last public performance for money was in 1967. For free, it was 1972, with the exception of two little one-shot, one-song things. But that's just for friends, out of friendship for the people involved, and also because it was fun.
Our democracy is predicated on the belief that our government should be accessible by the people. We cannot allow ourselves to give in to fear or shy away from interacting with the public.
My greatest fear is speaking in public. You meet, like, um, people who just concentrate on me. I'd rather not have everyone focus on me.
