> How do you make sure that your consumer reports aren't corrupt? And how do they get financed? Research into things that cause long-term effects (like lead or mercury or tobacco) is very expensive and not really viable for a company that needs to produce a profit short-term.

1. The methods used to figure out that mercury/cigarettes are harmful is some combination of animal testing and running reports over medical records. These are expensive largely because of regulation.

2. Short term profit goals don't actually destroy the incentive to do research, even expensive research. Consumer reports does tests on cars, requiring facilities and specialists. The major banks spend insane amounts of money doing analysis of companies. Intel, google, etc all invest heavily in R&D.

3. Re: corruption, there's a very strong financial incentive for corporations to not be corrupt. Most of them offer satisfaction guarantees for example, and corporate scandals result in resignation and share price depression. Most of the examples of corruption I'm aware of involve politicians and government agencies. If the EPA were private, it would probably have gone bankrupt / been overtaken by competitors due to its cigarette ineptitude and other failings.

> In my mind, if you want a functioning libertarian state you need to strengthen public research and make sure it's not corrupted. So strengthen the EPA instead of abolishing it.

I think the libertarians completely agree with the strengthening sentiment of your comment. Where we differ with you is that we think the most powerful thing you can do to strengthen public research is to privatize it.

To expand on that: as I said above, I believe the EPA by design ends up in a state of regulatory capture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture), a problem for which I'm aware of no workable solutions for. You yourself probably don't trust the EPA's health advice nearly as much as a smart friend or two of yours who is actually looking at the literature on a given topic. Contrast this with consumer reports, who (personally) I trust at the same level. I think this problem is structural / inherent to public research originations... and needs to be directly fixed by aligning the interest of the researcher with the consumers of their research.

To put that another way: the best researchers I know aren't working for public research institutions. The best ML researchers I'm aware of have actually quit tenured professorships to join Google, Facebook, and Baidu. The best finance/economics researchers I'm aware of work at hedge funds. The best agricultural researchers I'm aware of work at food conglomerates. The best biologists I'm aware of work at drug companies... The majority of the public researchers I'm familiar with (growing up as the son of a math professor) are basically curiosity junkies. This is sort of good, and I'm happy that they're happy, but I think isn't really the foundation that life-changing research comes from -- you want the researcher to be personally invested in a workable solution, not academically curious about something in the area.

To put that a third way: your comment is an example of the nirvana fallacy. What method can we use to "strengthen public research" that won't result in the same misaligned incentives we're currently seeing? What method of preventing corruption are you suggesting beyond those which are already known to not work?