There's a long, admiring story in today's Washington Post extolling Finland as a possible model for European development.

Finland has invested heavily in scientific research, especially since it backed a big winner during the early 1990s in Nokia. Nokia stock held by the government is one source of funds, but overall the country puts a whopping 3.6% of its income into research, well ahead of the U.S., and nearly twice as much as the European average.

The result is that, while Finland does have substantial unemployment, and the problems of an aging population threatening its ample social safety net, the 5.5 million people there are nearly as happy as those in the Monty Python song. (All together, Finnophiles!)

One respondent at the Dave Farber list expressed the view that the U.S. actually does better than the figures indicate, and that government is mostly out of the picture.

He's half-right.

The U.S. government has heavily funded this nation's research effort ever since World War II. The great mega-versities whose football teams dominate the NCAA rankings are mainly state institutions, and even private universities are directly funded by the federal government in many ways.

That's far from all. There are many government agencies devoted nearly entirely to funding research, including DARPA and NASA. The Internet itself is the direct result of these efforts. So are most of the Nobel prizes won by American scientists in these last 60 years. So, of course, are Velcro and Tang.

However, this leadership is threatened today as never before. The current U.S. government has been cutting back its direct research funding, and politicizing its indirect funding. Agencies like DARPA have been told to shorten their time horizons, just as private corporations did 20-30 years ago (Xerox was once a technology leader).

The results take a long time to filter down. American innovation continues thanks in part to Moore's Law, partly due to the "long tail" of scientists living out their careers, partly due to the sheer size of the past U.S. effort.

But we are in the process of being overtaken, by Japan, by China, by India. Once our research lead is gone, it will take enormous effort to reclaim it, if that is even possible.

This is just another example of Bush people eating the seed corn that Clinton people planted. They're the duck, the chicken, and the dog in the Little Red Hen story.

And when there's no more bread to be had, they'll be completely surprised, then they'll blame "liberals" for it all.

They will, as in all things, be lying.

What we have in this country is a Stalinist political organization that stands for the worst excesses of the 19th Century robber barons combined with those of the 15th Century's Inquisition leaders. Just as the Stalinists did, they dress it up in rhetoric, but Mencken is right -- fascism in America is called Americanism.

What it will take to turn this around is, first, the realization by Americans of just how much evil is being done in their name and, second, the willingness of Americans to sacrifice in ending it.

Failure to do so will turn us into Argentina within a decade.

We're already behind Finland.