Perry: Expecting a government tp compensate for a ‘lack of rationality’ is rather like expecting a bunch of alcoholics to compensate for a lack of sobriety.

…or a bunch of whores to compensate for a lack of chastity.

Hmmm…these two ideas need to be tied together somehow. A parliament of whores loving money to the point where they’ll bend over and grab their ankles for anything…unleasing evil with the degree of their love of money, amassing their war chests and campaigning like asking “hey baby, how ’bout you and me and some of this pork?!” They turn it around and pimp it back at us.

The junkie whores on K street are beggin’ pimp daddy for just another fix to get through the day….

It’s not as if mr no-veto is taking any sort of principled libertarian stand against pork!

Sorry if I hijacked the thread. I hadn’t meant to turn this into an ethics discussion. But considering that Bush’s veto was made on ethical, not economic, grounds, I felt I had to set the record straight.

Rosignol,

There is a profound difference between (say) the invention of the flying machine (which led, indirectly, to Dresden and Hiroshima) and the use of human parts for medical experimentation, even though the logic for both may be identical.

Here’s what we do know: using people for medical experiments does not have a good pedigree (vivisection, the Nazi stuff, and so on).

I’m not an anti-abortionist — I think it’s a horrible but sometimes inescapable evil — so I’m not approaching this from an “all life is sacred” perspective.

And frankly, using human remains for experiments doesn’t worry me too much — pathologists use cadavers to instruct medical students all the time — but what made me feel really icky was when scientists and some academics said that there was inadequate supply of stem cells from aborted fetuses, and perhaps the supply could be augmented by artificial insemination and test-tube fetus production.

If anyone doesn’t see the similarities between that proposal and the “Matrix” power supply, then we have no common ground for further discussion.

No; rather nip that little thought, and any possibility thereof, in the bud (and even that metaphor, in this context, is harshly ironic).

Or, at the very least, refuse to allow the government to participate in the process, which is what Bush has done, in essence.

Vis-a-vis the results of Nazi medical experimentation, you are incorrect. All the files recovered by the Western Allies were destroyed. I don’t know if the Russians did the same with whatever they came across.

Nevertheless, some of the data, or at least the top-level findings, managed to get out. I earnestly recommend this article as background.

How many street lights are provided by private firms?

On private toll roads, 100% of them.

How many private bin lorry firms are there – collect your rubbish then drop a bill though your letterbox?

In many parts of the world, that is exactly how it is done. In many parts of Britain, it is contracted out to private companies, so simply removing the state will not end rubbish collection… “where there’s muck, there’s brass”

Who, other than the most absurdly generous individual, is going to fund social science research?

You are goiing to have to be more specific. Which social ‘sciences’ are you talking about?

Consider the economics of state intervention, not the politics and philosophy.

The question is why would people want this? The market aims to provide people with what they want, otherwise capitalists cannot make any money. AOL had the option of not allowing its customers access to the web, but they did because that is what people wanted.

In the scenario you envisage there would ample opportunity for entrepreneurs to make money by allowing inter-operability.

As for government funded internets, I was arguing against government involvement altogether.

And Betamax was not superior, the tapes were great quality but the recording time sucked. People decided they would rather quantity over quality. Engineers may lament that but it is what the people actually wanted.

First is the assumption that, because the state was involved, a particular innovation or type of activity or kind of facility could not have existed without the state supporting and funding it.

This is a basic tenet of the statist mindset, and it creeps into any discussion of how to do things because we have all been taught since childhood that any major advance in society has to have had some form of state sanction or involvement.

It is often seen in discussions about poverty or other social needs. Any criticism of statist programs is automatically met with the response, “Oh, sure, just let them starve in the street then, huh?”

It is literally impossible for some people to imagine a society in which kindness, charity, and compassion could possibly operate without state action. Indeed, to be opposed to state action, and for private, voluntary organizations to give aid to the needy, is deemed to be lacking in compassion, as if good works require statist formulations.

The obvious and rational response to this argument, whether regarding poverty, science, medicine, or any other subject is similar to an argument discussed at Chicagoboyz the other day—if you have a choice between free, independent people making a series of decisions, based on their own interests and expertise, or having the decisions made by a politicized, uninformed process manned by people whose primary motivation is securing votes in the next election, which do you choose?

The statist, because they truly fear the former, will always pick the latter.

Secondly, and even more pervasive, is the misguided notion that a desirable, positive outcome justifies the process to achieve it. This is used both to explain the need for state action, i.e., “None of this could ever have happened if the gov’t didn’t provide huge sums of money.” and to justify libertarian or other non-statist approaches, i.e., “There would be a much more efficient or positive outcome if the state kept its nose out.”

Both of these variations of the argument are in error.

Liberty, individual freedom, the right to make choices as free adults is its own justification, regardless of outcome. It does not need to be justified, and is not invalidated if some people make foolish, wrong, or tawdry choices.

Inalienable means just that—no other justifications are needed. If a free society and its members don’t spend their money, individually or in aggregate, as wisely or justly as you would like, then it is your complex and difficult job to persuade them to change their habits and realign their priorities.

Maybe some things would not have happened, or been built, or been provided, if the state had not stepped in to take the money from its citizens and drive those outcomes. But, just maybe, a few hundred million more people would be alive today to go bumbling along living their lives as they see fit if so many states had not decided that they required, and had a right to, the lives and treasure of their citizens.

For every moon shot there is a Bergen-Belsen. For every node on the internet there is the ghost of a man, woman, or child who cries out from beyond this life.

The rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are not justified by some positive outcome, but by the minds and spirits of individuals as ends in and of themselves.

The state, for all its good intentions, may not pave its highways with the bones of its citizens.

information is not perfect, people do not make the ‘right’ decisions, they are not rational and spend their money in unpredictable ways. Government sometimes has to compensate for this lack of rationality.

Expecting a government tp compensate for a ‘lack of rationality’ is rather like expecting a bunch of alcoholics to compensate for a lack of sobriety. Governments are motivated by political considerations, not ‘rationality’.

2. People are talking about an ideal situation re philathropy funded research. If there is not a culture of educational/scientific philanthropy, as in the UK, then what is the alternative but to let government help out?

All these suppositions are made upon the assumption of a near perfect world with perfect information, where everyone understands the importance of funding research, and not giving your money to animal charities instead.

N.B.! information is not perfect, people do not make the ‘right’ decisions, they are not rational and spend their money in unpredictable ways. Government sometimes has to compensate for this lack of rationality.

They may have. I suspect they wouldn’t have. My gut feeling is we would have had something more akin to a huge number of AOL type serivces and, probably, more government funded “walled gardens” like Minitel and Prestel.

The issue with Betamax wasn’t down to experts. There’s no debate, Betamax was a technically better solution than VHS. VHS won the marketing game and got the market. The market isn’t perfect, it often makes astonishinly bad decisions. Warren Buffett frequently points to this as being one of the reasons he’s as rich as he is.