I'd feel less comfortable without NASA, NIH, and DARPA, since I have benefitted a great deal from the work they sponsored. I doubt very much I would have had those benefits so soon without these grossly inefficient agencies that have no idea what they are doing carelessly spending other people's money on creating the space age, the Internet age, and the age of genomics respectively.

I don't believe for a second that private investment would have done these earlier or better if the greedy government had stolen less tax money from you.

edit: downvotes yay! Please enjoy using the Internet to show your distain for giving credit for revolutionary federally-funded technology projects.

>I'd feel less comfortable without NASA, NIH, and DARPA, since I have benefitted a great deal from the work they sponsored. I doubt very much I would have had those benefits so soon without these grossly inefficient agencies... I don't believe for a second that private investment would have done these earlier.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” -Upton Sinclair

Interestingly, one of your examples, genomics, is exactly contradicted by Celera. At the time of inception the human genome project was slated to take 20 years! (We'd only be halfway done with it now). Say what you want about their idiotic and immoral business model - patenting and licensing human genes - the "private arm" of the human genomics project pushed for shotgun sequencing and got the genome sequenced in 3 years; and the hapmap shortly thereafter.

The Celera example is a good one, and you are right they did speed up genomics in a specific way. I'm certain they used many people trained-in-NIH-funded-labs and built directly on NIH-funded work, but it's still a good point.

The "idiotic and immoral business model" is seriously not cool though. Clinton banned patenting human genes directly, which might make pure capitalists cross.

> “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” -Upton Sinclair

The author met that they've benefited in the sense that we all have benefited.

I very much doubt that there are many people in the world who have directly benefited (i.e., received grants from) all of NASA, the NIH, and DARPA.

Even if the benefit is indirect, it's still hard to see how alternatives are possible, even when the evidence is right there in front of you. Did you even know we eradicated two diseases without the NIH (Smallpox, eliminated in the US by 1897, long before the NIH existed) - and Polio, eliminated through the private nonprofit March of Dimes.

Of the three, I think private investment would have done better than the first two. Even DARPA is notable for a handful of home runs that may have been just luck.

You realize that is exactly the model of VC? :) You bet on a lot of very long shots, but the few mega successes pay off sufficiently to make it all worth it.

Right. Are VC's normally using public money?

But since the first two actually did it, it's up to you to convince me of that.

For bonus points, try to do your job today without making use of federally-bootstrapped technology.

edit: also, Fede_V's sibling comment is spot-on.

>But since the first two actually did it...

Did what?

If it wasnt for the cold war and the space race, I really doubt that NASA would have ever been created. Should we seek for another cold war because its a medium in which some kind of innovation occur? So are regular wars? Should we demand our states to start wars because technology advances during those times?

Or we could demand our states care as much about advancing human knowledge during peace time as they do during war time.

Would you feel less comfortable without the NSA? Or put another way, are you just cherry-picking the agencies you happen to like in order to make your point?

No, I just don't know much about the NSA (and maybe they like it that way) and I mentioned the ones I am most confident about.

If you're asking if the federal government has wasted a lot of my money on things I don't like: sure they have. First, that's not the topic at hand, and second, private ventures also waste fortunes on stupid things, and sometimes with my money e.g. pension funds.

The NSA's primary charter is security, not science. Science that happens at the NSA is a happy accident.

NASA and the NIH are explicitly research-focused. And DARPA may be part of DOD, but its charter is right in the name -- advanced research.

"a bunch of people spending other peoples money on things that they dont understand and they dont really care about"...

That sounds like it describes the purchasing department in any big corporation, or the got-the-job-through-nepotism nephew or cousin of the owner in a small business.

You know what they say, right? Capitalism works...in theory.

Yep, the cognitive dissonance here is pretty strong.

What is a public corporation, but 'a bunch of people [C-level,VP-level,Manager-level] spending other people'[sic]s[shareholder's] money on things that they[shareholder's] don'[sic]t understand and they[shareholder's] don'[sic]t really care about[shareholders seem to only care about 'ROI' and/or 'ROE']'.

This reads as little more than pure emotion coupled with sweeping universalizing--the state is universally evil, private capital is universally good. Absolutely nothing about states or capital investors can be so easily reduced to such a binary conclusion.

Private capital, and the humans who administer it, has repeatedly mismanaged funds, and been responsible for enormous fuck-ups that have far-reaching and devastating social, environmental, political, economic, material, and global impacts. Private investors routinely make bad investments. They also rather frequently are found to prioritize the extraction of value from their investments in spite of the potential or realized impacts of such extraction.

The state does not take money. We no longer live under feudalism, friend. We no longer labor under the unquestionable divine right of kings. The modern democratic state is, by the free association and choice of its underlying organizational units, and the continued consent of its citizens, asked to assume the role and responsibilities, at least in the US, of the following:

- form a more perfect union

- establish justice

- insure domestic tranquility

- provide for the common defense

- promote the general welfare

- secure the blessing of liberty to its citizens and their posterity

Private capital could never fulfill these obligations, because its focus is most definitely on extracting value from that which it invests in. I doubt very much you'd enjoy living in a world where its investment in you was dependent on extracting value from you (well, actually, you already do, but you don't feel the full brunt of that burden thanks to ... you guessed it ... the state).

Now, if you'd much rather live under feudalism, serfdom, obedience to divine kings, etc., well cool. But those are sociopolitical conditions under which people lived for centuries where they definitely were able to "pay lower taxes and let the private investors do the investment". Those are the systems under which money/property was actually taken from people, because people had no methods or institutions by which they can seek to protect themselves from the arbitrary whims of value extraction, or engage in political action that can bring change. That's why most now-democratic states saw revolutions in their past--it was the only way to make change happen, the only way to abolish systems of unfettered value extraction and replace them with something that protected the masses.

At least in the US, even the revered and worshipped founders realized pretty quickly after becoming an independent nation that taxes were unavoidable, because without public funds, the state could not fulfill the obligations for which it was instituted.

I shudder at the thought of living in a world where people trust VCs to provide that which the state, even in its dysfunction, works to provide.

>"The state does not take money. We no longer live under feudalism, friend. We no longer labor under the unquestionable divine right of kings. The modern democratic state is, by the free association and choice of its underlying organizational units, and the continued consent of its citizens, asked to assume the role and responsibilities, at least in the US, of the following:"

And what if we do not consent? I certainly don't, and yet I have no where to go. You call it freedom of association, I call it compliance under the threat of imprisonment.

Make no mistake about it, you can use fancy words and ideas to make it noble. However, if you choose to gloss over those that do no consent to your wonderful little 'union' of 'domestic tranquility' then you are not at all better than the feudal kings/lords that you use as a counter-example to democracy.

You know what was the big thing about the Feudal system? Absolute ownership of all land by kings/lords, where the peasants had to rent it by virtue of being born on the land. Oh so very analogous to what we have now where people have very little choice but to live in the state that they are born with. There is simply no alternative, no place where free people can go to pursue actual free-association through peaceful means. You just have to replace 'lords/kings' with 'state/government' and you quickly see the picture.

But of course, I am "free". I am free to move to Somalia, apparently. Either that, or more to another King/Lords piece of land.

I am genuinely confused at what "fancy words and ideas" you think I've used to make the state "noble". I was not advancing a defense of the nobility of the state. I was specifically responding to the full implications of the parent's comment with regard to allegations that a democratic state created and consented to by the people takes money and that VCs running the show would be such an improvement. There are no fancy words there.

> And what if we do not consent? I certainly don't, and yet I have no where to go. You call it freedom of association, I call it compliance under the threat of imprisonment.

Out of curiosity, how much that is afforded you by the existence and operations of a state--be it a member state or the federal state--can you look at and honestly say you both rely on and utilize, despite these ideals you espouse? Of that which the state provides in the course of fulfilling its duties to its citizens, and in its pursuit of the ideals of those whom its citizens elect to represent them, how much do you diligently deny yourself and decline to enjoy in the interest of remaining true to your ideals?

You say you do not consent, and I'm quite curious as to how diligently you live your life according to this principle.

Let's imagine you are faced with a decision to diligently stay off all state-funded roadways, or to use them instead. If you use them, do you deny that this provides a tacit consent to the social, political, and moral obligations that are inherent in funding these roadways? Do you argue that there is some social, political, or moral justification for using the common roadways freely, while also arguing there is justification for refusing to submit to funding them?

Alternatively, let's imagine some tragic accident befalls you, resulting in a need to seek medical care. Do you live out your refusal of consent of the obligations of citizenship and likewise resign yourself to not seek out medical care? You will likely have to travel to the hospital, and perhaps even use the state roadways that connect to it, perhaps even in an emergency vehicle that is funded by the state. If you truly deny that you consent to the authority of the state and the obligations of citizenship, then you obviously must deny yourself use of these state-provided things, yes? Surely you wouldn't argue that a person would be in the right to take advantage of these things provided by the state, and then, when the bill comes due, claim you have not consented, would you?

Because if, even in these simplest of scenarios, one denies that one created for oneself source(s) of obligation and tacit consent, then that person is just making it clear s/he desires to be an asshole, who wants the world to operate on his/her terms. That kind of person wants to freely enjoy the benefits of the state's operations, without being bothered to help foot the bill when able. (I am very much ignoring, for the sake of a simplistic dialogue, leaving out the condition of being unable to help shoulder the financial burden).

---

You present this idea of a "place where free people can go to pursue actual free-association through peaceful means". In what way can you explain this to be a free-association that is more real than the free association people operate under as citizens of a liberal-democratic state that guarantees a legitimate level of freedom, justice, and equality? Do you deny this other place you dream of would be yet another polity, yet another state? Are you simply not happy with the selection of liberal-democratic states that exist in the world, all trying in their own way to obtain the ideals of liberty, equality, justice, and a good life for their peoples? Because you are most certainly free to renounce your citizenship and pursue life elsewhere, are you not? I mean, you appear to be advancing a very hard-line notion of being actually free. And, as far as I know, there is no threat of imprisonment that prevents you from renouncing your citizenship. Sure, there are some nasty and punitive financial obligations of doing so in the US, but you won't be imprisoned. So, at least you've got that going for you.

Have you ever read Thus Spoke Zarathustra? You might like this short chapter:

http://4umi.com/nietzsche/zarathustra/11

I completely agree. Let's get rid of taxes, disband the military and the police.

We'll see who owns your "money" after that.