Too bad most people don't agree with your narrow minded and stupid conception of what government is for. I vote for government that takes risks in such matters.
It is indeed the job of the government to coerce and incent the development of strategically important technologies, and where the risks/rewards aren't sufficient in and of themselves for private industry to do that alone, it is the job of government either to sweeten the pot so that they will do so, or make the alternatives illegal so that they have no choice. I guess the third alternative is for the government to develop the technology itself directly, which sometimes the military has done, but probably most of us agree it's better to find a way to push private industry into doing it.
Another great example is emissions technology. There was no interest in that from private industry until California made it illegal to sell cars that didn't measure up. That regulatory regime sparked an incredible amount of research that never would have happened without government pressure. That's the stick approach. Bribing companies to develop green energy infrastructure is the carrot approach.
Whether the carrot is better or worse than the stick we can debate sometime, but clearly, it's the job of government to be using these tools to drive strategic technology development.
