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I used to donate to NPR, more than a decade ago. Not anymore, as the NPR has become more and more pro-statist and pro-war . . . I suppose some of the editors must have settled themselves with a big mortgage, gentrified over the years and have become afraid of upsetting the applecart by questioning authorities. LOL. Nowadays, I listen to it only as a way of keeping track of what's the latest spin from the top. Real news is delivered much faster and covered much more comprehensively from various angles via internet.
What makes anyone think that the government is more long-term oriented than corporations or private property owners? The whole idea of "government" is really about nobody actually owning anything, but merely managing things for their own profit while at the helm pulling levers of power. What's marketed as "long term" are usually for short-term personal gains. Besides, every human undertaking has an opportunity cost: whenever we do anything, something else is left undone. Market interest rate is what balances what's to be done now vs. what's to be done later. We have already seen what a mess the government manipulation of interest rate has gotten us into. Government prioritizing R&D would only lead to white elephants, if not worse.
Peer-review is inherently an extremely political process. Peer-review put Cuppernics on the burning stake. Back then, the search for truth and knowledge was funded mostly by a monopoly called the Church hirarchy (and its affiliated universities and colleges; most medieval scientists and mathematicians were theologians by training as it was bible knowledge qualification for funding). In the 20th century, soviet scientists who held different views from the dominant "peers" were sent to gulag camps in Siberia, as the soviets embraced the worship of an omnipotent state. New knowledge and truth almost always happen to a tiny minority (sometimes of 1) first. Peer-review process is far more likely to kill and bury new ideas than discovering them. The fact that our peer-review process has sort of worked okay for a handful of decades was only because the early reviewers had built their careers before government funded peer-review process took hold of research funding in our society. As the grip of government funding gets tighter, we are already witnessing the diversion of resources towards politically motivated R&D, just like how things panned out in the former soviet union. So far, the exile has been not granting tenure, instead of being sent to Siberia. LOL.
Stripping the bureaucracy of funding does not mean research won't be funded. In fact, the individual researchers on the front-line may actually get more funding when the bureaucrats (including some ex-scientists) are booted out from their cushy chairs. It's rather preposterous to think that the $20k/yr grad student and $30k/yr post-doc would stop doing what they enjoy doing if the department heads and government funding committee members stop taking home $300k to $500k per person per year.
There is already a mechanism in human society for curbing bureaucracy: it's called market competition / consumer choice. Private corporations also have a tendency to grow their own bureaucracy if they can monopolize a market; it's the competitive pressures from consumers' right to do business with someone else that keep private corporations lean (or replace them altogether with leaner corporations). Government on the other hand is a device for limiting consumer choice, in order to benefit the monopolists.
"Common" government services in police, fire, garbage/sewer, etc. suffer from the same problem. Municipal garbage collection has a long history with organized crime. Most human settlements do not involve municipal sewer: private septic tanks serve 35% of American households; when we think through the size of rural/suburban households vs. urban house holds, and the number households in a rural/suburban town vs. an urban city, it's quite obvious that municipal sewer mostly only covers a few miles around the largest cities. It's interesting to note that most of America's municipal sewer system were built over a century ago, and now creaking under lack of infrastructure investment. The most recent attempts to build up brand new municipal sewer systems in cities/towns where there had been none have been plagued with funding over-run's and embezzlements. We should do well recognize the difference between today's bureaucracy vs. bureaucracy in its infancy in America. People, including those entering bureaucracy were naive more than half a century ago; not anymore today. . . and we can't find 1950's men (or women) to staff any government bureaucracy today. That's why in societies that were plagued with bureaucratic traditions, like China, Russia, Persia and ancient Egypt, they had massive civilization-wide exhaustive wars of extermination to overthrow existing regimes every 60-70 years or so. That's how they historically got rid of their bureaucrats and put in a new generation afresh chastened by the perils of bureaucratic/monopolistic greed. People are by nature greedy; that's how social improvements came from: each of us figuring out ways of cutting corners, getting things done for less cost. Here in the western free market tradition, the counter-parties' right to do business with someone else is the ultimate guarantee that people don't get away with exercising personal greed at someone else' expense. Bureaucracy and government monopoly are the exact opposite of that. Over time, the cumulative unchecked greed built up in a few generations of bureaucrats (who want their own kids to benefit from being in position of monopolistic power too) is guaranteed to bring about social chaos (which is not due to lack of government but due to too much misgovernment by the existing bureaucrats)
Garbage collection is private in most towns in America. I take my own trash to the town recycling center. Sewer is also mostly private in most towns; septic tanks. Even in cities, it is not a given why there should be a city-wide monopoly. In the absence of bureaucratic rules to the contrary, developers can easily route a block or a few blocks into a holding tank, to be cleared either by mobile units or competing mains. People would be shopping for houses (and rentals) partly based on sewer service just like they consider everything else put together by developers. Fire and police should be privatizable too . . . especially given how expensive they have become and how "officer safety" has superseded everything else in real life. There are already private firefighters hired by insurance companies, and they did a much more effective job than government firefighters rescuing resident homes built in forests (the merit of building homes in those places is a different issue altogether). Public road building only became prevalent since the mid-20th century. Before then, roads were built in two ways:
1. by feet, hooves and wagon wheels traversing them;
2. "turn-pikes" that collected tolls on those passing through.
It's not at all clear why money traversing back and forth from local to D.C. then back, leaking massive amounts to various lobbies along the way, is considered the best way of maintaining roads.
posted by 96.233.42...
, Sat, 27 Nov 2010 10:54:30
, Fri, 26 Nov 2010 07:46:32
, Thu, 25 Nov 2010 07:43:14
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