At the urgent request of the Pentagon, scientists and engineers are rushing to create an artificial arm that works like a flesh-and-blood one for the growing number of soldiers who are losing their limbs in the Iraq war.

This will no doubt have some ignorants saying, "thank God for the Pentagon, now we have prosthetic limbs able to perform fine movements." Not to sound callous, but amputation and paralyzation are not common enough for the market to have decided that much more should be done above what has already been done. The allocation of what will no doubt be an astounding number of millions of dollars in research money could have been spent on something more in demand/efficient.

By the way, the similarity between the argument for government-funded research and the arguments used to show the existence of the free rider problem is impossible to ignore.