Valerie Jarrett recently posted a blog entry at Whitehouse.gov titled "Celebrating National Entrepreneurs' Day," a reference to the Presidential Proclamation last week announcing both a Day and a Week to celebrate the American capitalist:  "Entrepreneurs embody the promise that lies at the heart of America -- that if you have a good idea and work hard enough, the American dream is within your reach."

[H]istorical experience in this country and others clearly indicates that governments who try to pick winners and drive growth too often end up wasting resources and stifling rather than promoting innovation. This is in part due to the limited ability of the government to predict the future, but also because such exercises are distorted by lobbyists and rent seekers, which are more likely to favor backward looking industries than forward looking ones. In the United States such failures at picking winners and losers includes most prominently the Synthetic Fuel Corporation, a $20 billion Federal project in the 1980s that failed to provide the promised alternative to oil.

President Obama has taken historic steps to lay the foundation for the innovation economy of the future. The Obama Innovation Strategy builds on well over $100 billion of Recovery Act funds that support innovation, additional support for education, infrastructure and others in the Recovery Act and the President's Budget, and novel regulatory and executive order initiatives.

• "Enact the Largest R&D increase in our nation's history.  Double the R&D budget of key science agencies." (Current NIH research budget: $31.2 billion, plus an additional $10 billion from the Recovery Act.  The 2010 National Science Foundation budget: $6.9 billion.)

• "Reform public schools to deliver a complete and competitive education."  (More money to the teacher's unions.)

• Invest three percent of GDP in R&D. ($437 billion at today's levels.  That $20 billion Synfuels boondoggle is looking cheap.)

• "[$500 million to] design world-class online courses for post-secondary students...available at community colleges."  (Is this the job of the federal government?)

• "Invest in our nation's roads, bridges, and mass transit.  The Recovery Act provides $36 billion for infrastructure projects."

• "Modernize the Electric Grid. The Recovery Act provides $4.5 billion for the development of technologies to enable greater energy efficiency, customer demand response, energy storage, and other components of the ‘Smart Grid.'"

• $6.25 billion in loan guarantees "to invest in transmission lines that will increase the development of renewables."

• "Fulfill a new transportation vision with high-speed rail. The President made a down payment on this strategy with an $8 billion investment in the Recovery Act."

• "Assure net neutrality to preserve the freedom and openness of Internet access."

• "Appoint a Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Government."  (Entrepreneurs have been crying out for more bureaucrats.)

• "Ensure working financial markets [that] increases supervision of financial markets [and] rebuilds trust in our markets by creating a Consumer Financial Protection Agency."  (The 2000-page Financial Regulation Bill.)

• "Provide training and mentoring to entrepreneurs... The SBA has 68 district offices and over a thousand nonprofit ‘resource partners' that offer 14,000 counselors who serve about 1.5 million entrepreneurs and small business owners each year...to promote the creation of new businesses, particularly among women and minorities."

• "Make the government more transparent, participatory, and collaborative.  (Sure, any day now.)

• "Double the nation's supply of renewable energy in the next three years."  (Will any "rent seekers" or "lobbyists" receive federal grants?)

• "The Recovery Act and national energy policy will generate a proliferation of new technologies, processes, and jobs relating to improving energy efficiency. The Recovery Act alone provided [$15.8 billion for] renewable energy and energy efficiency and conservation efforts."

• "Enact a cap-and-trade program to curb oil dependence and greenhouse gas emissions while spurring renewable energy technologies."

• "The President has proposed RE-ENERGYSE, a joint educational campaign from the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation to inspire tens of thousands of young Americans to pursue careers in clean energy."

• "Make the largest investment in technology for electric vehicles and transportation electrification in U.S. history." (The authors don't specify how this differs from the failed Synfuels program.)

• "Deploy up to $25 billion in loans to support American manufacturing of advanced vehicle technologies."

• "Support the next generation of American biofuels."  (Isn't burning our crops sort of a "backward looking industry"?)

• "Improve vehicle fuel efficiency to reduce oil dependence and spark innovation."

• "Expand the use of health IT...e.g. electronic medical records."

• "Slow the growth of health care costs. The President is committed to comprehensive reform for a health care system."  (Obamacare.)