From: szabo@techbook.com (Nick Szabo)
Subject: Re: What is Marrou's position on research and space exp?
Keywords: Marrou, policy, space
Organization: TECHbooks --- Public Access UNIX --- (503) 644-8135
Distribution: usa
Date: Sun, 26 Jul 1992 12:45:17 GMT

In article <+dwxt!#@rpi.edu> greenm2@aix.rpi.edu (Matthew Greenman) writes:

>What is Marrou's/the LP's position concerning government-funded
>research? 

Non-defense research is has wastes $100's of billions of taxpayer
money with very little payoff. (Alas, so has a lot of defense 
research, but that necessarily has to be funded by government).

The examples are legion: Clinch River Breeder Reactor, the fusion
program, the synfuels program, the Shuttle, Space Station "Freedom"
and the Superconducting Super-Collider have eaten $100's of billions.  
Clinch River, the fusion program, and synfuels are total failures, and 
the Shuttle costs over ten (10) times as much as our defense and 
commercial expendable rockets.  SSF and SSC are delayed, far over budget, 
designs cut, and no expectation of revenue to pay for either project.  
Many space stations and particle colliders have been built since the
1950's; they have produced no major commercial spinoffs.  Politicians 
have no scientific or engineering competence, and this is well 
reflected in the projects they choose to fund.

Another major problem is the "negative spinoff", when government funded 
scientists suppress alternate private sector ideas to protect their own 
turf.  The most blatant example of this is in fusion research, where the 
government-funded hot fusion scientists have actively maligned alternatives 
like cold fusion and muon-catalyzed fusion in ways more reminiscient of a 
Medieval bishop fighting heresy than a scientist searching for truth.

Meanwhile, the most productive inventions since WWII: the transistor, 
integrated circuit, CPU, RAM, handheld calculator, personal computer, 
VCR, relational database, electronic spreadsheet, etc. were developed 
in the private sector, at a cost orders of magnitude lower than 
Federal projects.  The most exciting technological threads of today 
are also being driven by the private sector; for example most of the recent 
nanotechnology breakthroughs (eg moving individual atoms with atomic
force microscopes) have been made in IBM's Almaden and Yorktown 
labs. 

Similarly, Japan's most innovative products, including the first transistor 
radio, the Sony Walkman, Nintendo, personal VCRs, etc. were developed in 
the private sector, not by MIDI as popular myth holds.  The percentage 
of private sector R&D is far higher in Japan than in the U.S.; they are 
beating us in the game we invented. 

Even privately funded pure science, like the Keck telescope, has produced 
more science per dollar than government funded projects like the much-hyped 
Hubble telescope. We can reap huge benefits if we transfer research money 
from government control to private sector control. 

I'm not sure of the exact platform, but the general goal of libertarians
is to reduce or eliminate non-defense government funding for research, and 
eliminate taxes on private sector research, infusing $100's of billions 
into far more efficient reseaarch.  I would argue that pure science and 
exploration should still have some govnerment funding, an "impure" libertarian 
stance, but that's nitpicking at this point.  It's far more important 
to eliminate those programs where the government is pretending to do 
something commercially useful at the taxpayer's huge expense.

We should also look at the ideas of the libertarian-oriented 
Foresight Institute.  One of these is "idea futures", which
would allow the private sector to hedge investments against uncertain 
scientific predictions such as ozone depletion, the greenhouse
effect, etc., while providing private funding for the accurate 
measurement of these phenomenon.


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