How Libertarianism was created by big business lobbyists

[myrkul]

Did I get it right?

No. Try again on Fluorine.

What's your take on it, then, Mr Knowitall?

It would be more illuminating if you were to discover the answer yourself, than to have it handed to you on a platter. So try again. What might Fluorine represent?

[1714012297]

1714012297

[1714012297]

1714012297

[myrkul]

Did I get it right?

No. Try again on Fluorine.

What's your take on it, then, Mr Knowitall?

It would be more illuminating if you were to discover the answer yourself, than to have it handed to you on a platter. So try again. What might Fluorine represent?

Haa! You don't know either, so you're fishing for ideas! You seem a bit fussy though. What could be more fundamental than human nature, such that it's required on "page one" of evolution??

Oh, no, I know. But as I said, it would be more illuminating to you if you were to puzzle it out yourself. Hint: the process isn't evolution, it's society. What might a government supporter view as necessary, but which, in the end, destroys the goal of liberty?

[FirstAscent]

Did I get it right?

No. Try again on Fluorine.

What's your take on it, then, Mr Knowitall?

It would be more illuminating if you were to discover the answer yourself, than to have it handed to you on a platter. So try again. What might Fluorine represent?

Haa! You don't know either, so you're fishing for ideas! You seem a bit fussy though. What could be more fundamental than human nature, such that it's required on "page one" of evolution??

Oh, no, I know. But as I said, it would be more illuminating to you if you were to puzzle it out yourself. Hint: the process isn't evolution, it's society. What might a government supporter view as necessary, but which, in the end, destroys the goal of liberty?

Just like it would be more illuminating if Rassah could actually demonstrate understanding of the old growth forest/spotted owl scenario in the other thread, where you don't seem to think a demonstration of understanding is necessary. Very hypocritical.

[MoonShadow]

Did I get it right?

No. Try again on Fluorine.

Also the identity of Grover.

[crispy]

Except it's so wrong. It has been shown that the government will fund things that corporations won't. Corporations typically will only engage in R & D that has a payoff within a certain amount of time, typically much less than government funded research might yield. This is known, and examples abound.

Here's an example for your edification:   Samuel Pierpoint Langley (government funding) vs. the Wright brothers (private funding).

Langley attempted flight on October 7th, 1903. His huge 54-foot-long flying machine had two 48-foot wings -- one in front and one in back. It was launched from a catapult on the Potomac River, and it fell like a sack of cement into the water. On December 8th he tried again. This time the rear wing caved in before it got off its catapult.

Just nine days later, the Wright brothers flew a trim little biplane, with almost no fanfare, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Their advantage was that they'd mastered the problem of controlling the movement of their plane, and they'd preceded their work with four years of careful experimentation with kites and gliders.

Source: http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi32.htm

Another article explains why private funding worked *better* than government funding:

If lavish Federal subsidies had been unable to buy Dr. Langley success, what chance would the Wright brothers' unfunded venture expect to have? Surprisingly, their chances were a lot better than might be imagined. Freed from the subsidy-induced waste and indolence that plagues government funded operations, the Wright brothers' limited financial resources actually contributed to their success. Because they could not afford the costs associated with repeated flight tests of their airplane, they developed a wind tunnel to test aerodynamic designs. This saved them a great deal of time. The Wright brothers were the first men to compile data from which an airplane could be designed. With limited finances, it was far easier to correct errors on paper than to continually rebuild a test model that was improperly designed.

Source: http://www.economicthinking.org/technology/noballoonattached.html

[FirstAscent]

Except it's so wrong. It has been shown that the government will fund things that corporations won't. Corporations typically will only engage in R & D that has a payoff within a certain amount of time, typically much less than government funded research might yield. This is known, and examples abound.

Here's an example for your edification:   Samuel Pierpoint Langley (government funding) vs. the Wright brothers (private funding).

Langley attempted flight on October 7th, 1903. His huge 54-foot-long flying machine had two 48-foot wings -- one in front and one in back. It was launched from a catapult on the Potomac River, and it fell like a sack of cement into the water. On December 8th he tried again. This time the rear wing caved in before it got off its catapult.

Just nine days later, the Wright brothers flew a trim little biplane, with almost no fanfare, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Their advantage was that they'd mastered the problem of controlling the movement of their plane, and they'd preceded their work with four years of careful experimentation with kites and gliders.

Source: http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi32.htm

Another article explains why private funding worked *better* than government funding:

If lavish Federal subsidies had been unable to buy Dr. Langley success, what chance would the Wright brothers' unfunded venture expect to have? Surprisingly, their chances were a lot better than might be imagined. Freed from the subsidy-induced waste and indolence that plagues government funded operations, the Wright brothers' limited financial resources actually contributed to their success. Because they could not afford the costs associated with repeated flight tests of their airplane, they developed a wind tunnel to test aerodynamic designs. This saved them a great deal of time. The Wright brothers were the first men to compile data from which an airplane could be designed. With limited finances, it was far easier to correct errors on paper than to continually rebuild a test model that was improperly designed.

Source: http://www.economicthinking.org/technology/noballoonattached.html

Please explain how this relates to MIT's motor development which was funded by DARPA.

[MoonShadow]

Did I get it right?

No. Try again on Fluorine.

What's your take on it, then, Mr Knowitall?

It would be more illuminating if you were to discover the answer yourself, than to have it handed to you on a platter. So try again. What might Fluorine represent?

Haa! You don't know either, so you're fishing for ideas! You seem a bit fussy though. What could be more fundamental than human nature, such that it's required on "page one" of evolution??

Oh, no, I know. But as I said, it would be more illuminating to you if you were to puzzle it out yourself. Hint: the process isn't evolution, it's society. What might a government supporter view as necessary, but which, in the end, destroys the goal of liberty?

This is one of those analogies where one aspect is deliberately vague, so that different people can see differnet answeres and not be wrong.  I look at the 'fluorine' as representing something about governments that most people can't imagine can arise without government.  That could be "order" or "charity", or it could represent the regulatory nature of governments, and thus fluorine represents such dictates.  Or it could simply be the monopoly on force that is government itself.  I'm inclined to assume that it's likely the latter, because I also believe that the character Grover is a not very veiled reference to Grover Norquist, who has spent a career fighting the size of government in the pursuit of greater liberty (as he see's it, mind you), without really questioning the role of government in society, or it's importance to the end result.

[JoelKatz]

Except it's so wrong. It has been shown that the government will fund things that corporations won't. Corporations typically will only engage in R & D that has a payoff within a certain amount of time, typically much less than government funded research might yield. This is known, and examples abound.

And here we have new motors, the result of government funded research. Are you saying the motors don't now exist?

When the government does something, you see the thing the government did, and you reason (often correctly) that had the government not done it, it wouldn't have been done. However, what you don't see is what those resources could have produced had they not been taken by the government. And what you fail to factor in is the cost of all the research that doesn't produce useful results.

Yes, you need the government to take risks so bad that nobody's willing to take them with their own money. But it stands to reason that the vast majority of the time, the costs outweigh the probable benefits. We'd be better off without it.

Had the government not taxed the wealth that funded that research, those who produced that wealth would have used it for things they value more.

[myrkul]

Or it could simply be the monopoly on force that is government itself.  I'm inclined to assume that it's likely the latter, because I also believe that the character Grover is a not very veiled reference to Grover Norquist, who has spent a career fighting the size of government in the pursuit of greater liberty (as he see's it, mind you), without really questioning the role of government in society, or it's importance to the end result.

Well, I'm glad someone got it.

[FirstAscent]

Had the government not taxed the wealth that funded that research, those who produced that wealth would have used it for things they value more.

Only time will tell. The past doesn't necessarily corroborate your views.

[MoonShadow]

Had the government not taxed the wealth that funded that research, those who produced that wealth would have used it for things they value more.

Only time will tell. The past doesn't necessarily corroborate your views.

Time will not tell.  That is the very point.  We can't have two versions of society running side by side, with a government control and an anarchist experiment.  Well, we can sort of.  That was the original idea behind the seperate soverignty of the individual states of the US, but we don't really have that experiment anymore.  Some people simply aren't willing to let the experiment be long enough to have a conclusive outcome.  It's simply against their nature.

[bb113]

I used to think the government should fund long term R and D, no longer. I have seen what happens. They turn it into a jobs program, develop useless metrics by which to judge people's merits (p values and number of publications) that distort the process in various crappy ways. Everyone chases the metrics rather than real results, leading to the vast amount of false positive literature which in turn wastes the time of other researchers who have to sift through it all leading to lower quality work and more crap literature, etc in a vicious cycle. You can't even use the journal or author prestige as a heuristic since often these are the crappiest of all.

Maybe given a concrete goal and vast public support for funding it can be superior (eg apollo) but over time all government institutions get crappier and crappier (more bureaucratic and staffed by more mediocre, easy to replace individuals..ie cogs in the machine) due to the funding process and lack of negative feedback for not producing actual real results.

To be sure large companies can fall prey to this as well, it is about the size of the organization and the reward/punishment process. Government just exaggerates the lack of proper negative feedback since they can force people to pay for it. Honestly I don't even want my tax dollars going to the fda for approving drugs or NIH for funding research any longer (of course the alternative is not lower taxes, it would just get spent on something even crappier). FDA should focus on making sure the stuff on the label is the stuff in the package.

Speaking of the FDA did you know they set a target of drugs to approve each year, and try to keep this as constant as possible because any deviation could lead to questions? That is to say, the approval process is NOT focused on making sure drugs are useful or safe, but to meet some stupid metric.

[myrkul]

There is an existing, voluntary method for funding projects which "society" sees as necessary, but which traditional investors will not fund for various reasons.

It's called Kickstarter.

[bb113]

Except it's so wrong. It has been shown that the government will fund things that corporations won't. Corporations typically will only engage in R & D that has a payoff within a certain amount of time, typically much less than government funded research might yield. This is known, and examples abound.

And here we have new motors, the result of government funded research. Are you saying the motors don't now exist?

When the government does something, you see the thing the government did, and you reason (often correctly) that had the government not done it, it wouldn't have been done. However, what you don't see is what those resources could have produced had they not been taken by the government. And what you fail to factor in is the cost of all the research that doesn't produce useful results.

Yes, you need the government to take risks so bad that nobody's willing to take them with their own money. But it stands to reason that the vast majority of the time, the costs outweigh the probable benefits. We'd be better off without it.

Had the government not taxed the wealth that funded that research, those who produced that wealth would have used it for things they value more.

Sure, Opportunity Cost 101. But not everything is measurable in money. What about sentimental things like health, education, or family? How much money is your health worth if you lose it? $1000? What if you can afford a million dollars - does that make your health worth more? It doesn't make any sense to apply cold-blooded market efficiency to certain things. Otherwise one ends up going down a slippery slope towards analysing the financial pros-and-cons of things like euthanasia and eugenics.

I agree that in many cases government research may be a waste of time. If people are allocated a budget, they better use it or they'll lose it! However, my point gains the most significance in cases where there are clear moral values at stake, yet its worth is not measurable in money. E.g.: cancer cures, search-and-rescue/disaster relief tools, plentiful sources of potable water.... Even loss-making space exploration has value.

Health will be redefined to mean something else, education will be redefined to mean something else, family will be redefined to mean something else... all in pursuit of tricking people to maintain funding. You won't see a cancer cure in the near future because the majority of the research focuses on one target, then trying to compensate for everything else that fucks up in the system, etc. This is what occurs when linear thinking is used to assess systems with multiple feedbacks. Once people start really trying to model these tissues as systems they will then have to waste a bunch of time on getting rid of all the false interactions from their models and basically do the whole thing over again from scratch anyway. Best treatment for cancer is what it has been for 50 years: detect early, cut it out, then, if necessary, poison the person to near death in the hope the cancer dies first.

[bb113]

...

Sure, Opportunity Cost 101....

I agree that in many cases government research may be a waste of time. If people are allocated a budget, they better use it or they'll lose it! However, my point gains the most significance in cases where there are clear moral values at stake, yet its worth is not measurable in money. E.g.: cancer cures, search-and-rescue/disaster relief tools, plentiful sources of potable water.... Even loss-making space exploration has value.

Health will be redefined to mean something else, education will be redefined to mean something else, family will be redefined to mean something else... all in pursuit of tricking people to maintain funding. You won't see a cancer cure in the near future because the majority of the research focuses on one target, then trying to compensate for everything else that fucks up in the system, etc. This is what occurs when linear thinking is used to assess systems with multiple feedbacks. Once people start really trying to model these tissues as systems they will then have to waste a bunch of time on getting rid of all the false interactions from their models and basically do the whole thing over again from scratch anyway. Best treatment for cancer is what it has been for 50 years: detect early, cut it out, then, if necessary, poison the person to near death in the hope the cancer dies first.

What I meant with the cancer cures is that in a free market system that ignores any losses incurred by society as an unwitting third party, the path of least resistance is to milk the patient as they slowly die. Hence -- no major breakthroughs in the past 50 years.

Edit: could you elaborate on what you meant by redefining health/education/family? (It's getting a bit late here. Brain = slow.)

The same way a cow on a farm is redefined as livestock so as to not be regulated by animal rights laws. Health will be redefined to mean something one step removed from "amount of attention from a doctor". Education will be (already has been) redefined as getting people to memorize things in books, family I have no idea... perhaps it will grow to include a government family counselor or something.

[JoelKatz]

Sure, Opportunity Cost 101. But not everything is measurable in money. What about sentimental things like health, education, or family? How much money is your health worth if you lose it? $1000? What if you can afford a million dollars - does that make your health worth more?

That's a decision people have to make ahead of time. We are failing to make that decision and it's one of things destroying our health care system. If you want hundreds of thousands of dollars spent to extend your life a month or two at the end, that's your choice. But I don't see why my health insurance should be unaffordable because of it. Our health and education systems are going down the tubes precisely because we don't conduct cost/benefit analyses and thus we don't focus our costs where they get us the greatest benefits and have to overpay for the benefits we really want.

It doesn't make any sense to apply cold-blooded market efficiency to certain things.

Quite the reverse, it doesn't make sense not to.

Otherwise one ends up going down a slippery slope towards analysing the financial pros-and-cons of things like euthanasia and eugenics.

It's even worse when you don't do that. You wind up driving costs through the roof and people can't afford the services they really do want. The protection against euthanasia and eugenics is individual rights.

I agree that in many cases government research may be a waste of time. If people are allocated a budget, they better use it or they'll lose it! However, my point gains the most significance in cases where there are clear moral values at stake, yet its worth is not measurable in money. E.g.: cancer cures, search-and-rescue/disaster relief tools, plentiful sources of potable water.... Even loss-making space exploration has value.

I agree. But if you factor in the probability that the research will not pan out, I think these all flunk any sensible cost/benefit analysis. I don't think you can make a coherent case against a cost benefit analysis.

[Richy_T]

old enough to hope that I might make it so that I might be able to get some of my money back.

You can't get it back, it's already spent. As you say, about the most you can hope for is that it would continue to be at least somewhat functional as a conduit of funds from the productive.

That said, the SS issue is one of demographics more than anything. The actualities of things are that retirees extract goods and services from the economy whilst not currently providing anything in return. As the non-productive grow compared to the productive, problems ensue. Having a private system would certainly have been better but still faces the same basic reality. The government also continues to move people from the productive to non-productive category at an alarming rate so it's just not looking good all around. Plan for your later years with that in mind and don't trust promissory notes from a group that considers a promises expiry date as as soon as you're out of sight.

[cunicula]

Sure, Opportunity Cost 101. But not everything is measurable in money. What about sentimental things like health, education, or family? How much money is your health worth if you lose it? $1000? What if you can afford a million dollars - does that make your health worth more?

That's a decision people have to make ahead of time. We are failing to make that decision and it's one of things destroying our health care system. If you want hundreds of thousands of dollars spent to extend your life a month or two at the end, that's your choice. But I don't see why my health insurance should be unaffordable because of it. Our health and education systems are going down the tubes precisely because we don't conduct cost/benefit analyses and thus we don't focus our costs where they get us the greatest benefits and have to overpay for the benefits we really want.

It doesn't make any sense to apply cold-blooded market efficiency to certain things.

Quite the reverse, it doesn't make sense not to.

Otherwise one ends up going down a slippery slope towards analysing the financial pros-and-cons of things like euthanasia and eugenics.

It's even worse when you don't do that. You wind up driving costs through the roof and people can't afford the services they really do want. The protection against euthanasia and eugenics is individual rights.

I agree that in many cases government research may be a waste of time. If people are allocated a budget, they better use it or they'll lose it! However, my point gains the most significance in cases where there are clear moral values at stake, yet its worth is not measurable in money. E.g.: cancer cures, search-and-rescue/disaster relief tools, plentiful sources of potable water.... Even loss-making space exploration has value.

I agree. But if you factor in the probability that the research will not pan out, I think these all flunk any sensible cost/benefit analysis. I don't think you can make a coherent case against a cost benefit analysis.

Joel, if you don't want the government to do research and put stuff in the public domain, then you have to support private research through strong IPR. However, IPR generates a monopoly rent that has a negative knock-on effect on all subsequent innovation.

The negative knock-on effects work as follows, if I invent B and you have to license A to invent B, then A is going to get a bunch of profit from my invention. If I invent C, and I have to license B to do this (and thus A as well), then A and B are both going to profit from me. Continue down the chain and there is no point in bothering to do D,E,F,G,..., the pie has to be divided among so many rent-seekers that there is nothing left for me to gain. [Consider for example the case where SHA-256 and ECSDA belong to Microsoft. Does bitcoin happen?]

There is plenty of evidence that putting research in the public domain stimulates subsequent invention. (i.e. that IPR reduces subsequent innovative output) e.g:
http://economics.mit.edu/files/6803
http://www.sfbtr15.de/uploads/media/Moser.pdf

Thus, even if the government is many times more inefficient than private research labs, it can still be better for society for the government to fund research. This is particularly true for basic research that has wide applicability (i.e. which can produce a long chain of dependent innovations).

Alternatives:
No IPR and no state-funded research. For things that are very easy to copy, such as life-saving medicines, this leads to almost no research being done.
Massive corporation that owns IPR to all science. I guess that is the libertarian solution to this problem. To me it sounds like a movie in the sci-fi/horror genre.

Your talk of cost-benefit analyses is naive. Credible cost-benefit analyses are extremely difficult to do in this area. The problem is dynamic and large-scale. This makes it very complex.

[JoelKatz]

If you think funding research to put it in the public domain make sense, you are absolutely welcome to do it. If you're spending your own money, it's much more likely you'll get the cost/benefit analysis right. Perhaps you are right, perhaps I am getting it wrong. The beauty of a free market is that everyone gets to do their own such analysis.

[cunicula]

If you think funding research to put it in the public domain make sense, you are absolutely welcome to do it. If you're spending your own money, it's much more likely you'll get the cost/benefit analysis right. Perhaps you are right, perhaps I am getting it wrong. The beauty of a free market is that everyone gets to do their own such analysis.

Sure, but the private problem is much, much simpler. The entrepreneur evaluates private benefit vs. research cost, while the state evaluates social benefit vs. research cost.
The fact that private calculations are more accurate isn't much help. The entrepreneurs are trying to solve the wrong problem.

Unless the entrepreneur is megacorp, a la Singapore Inc., then the entrepreneur will fail to undertake socially beneficial projects. If the alternative is mega-corp, I will take a US/European/Japanese democratic state any day of the week.

By the way, in developing countries, megacorp is often the way to go. The state's suck so much that citizens are often better off under megacorp's monopoly.