CERN and the Large Hadron Collider are funded by forcibly-extracted taxes. Robbery funds these projects. Why shouldn’t these and similar state-funded projects be funded by voluntary contributions? Why can’t the proponents of these projects compete for funds? Why can’t they market their projects to prospective financing sources, which could include anyone of us or any lover of science or any foundation or any consortium? Why must they force the funding out of us?
In the current system of robbery, who decides what shall be built and what uses the facilities are put to? What accountability to taxpayers and what incentives occur under this system? It has to be a typical non-market and non-voluntary exchange system in which some rather small and insulated clique or some union or special interest group of scientists seeking subsidies (government-imposed robbery) for their work prevails. If it’s a union, there will be some small group leading it.
I have written before on the corruption of science by the state, here and here.
The basic argument is not only over the details or correctness of the science done by government-funded science, but fundamentally over the robbery involved and the organizational defects produced by a system of robbery-funded science that lead to bad science, propagandized science, and wasteful science.
The argument is not over the occasional benefits that even government-funded science may produce. It is over why freedom must be short-circuited to fund science. That’s the position taken by proponents of science funded by state robbery. What makes government bureaucrats with scientific special interest groups at their side so able to select projects that pay for themselves? What disables them from seeking funding in the marketplace for ideas and projects? What gives them the right to force the funding out of innocent people who have other priorities? What gives these people the right to impose their priorities on others? Isn’t this simply a disguised form of slavery?
5:28 am on February 20, 2014
