Iowa Caucuses Today!

[N-Man]

The market is made up of idiots. Their doctorates failed to do any actual experiments to back it up. I base this on the fact that the market for quack medicine makes money up to and exceeding the market for legitimate medicine. The market is not all knowing. What do they base their conclusion on?

But, DJ, that is precisely the point. The market allows individuals to decide for themselves what they want. By funding science, you are telling people that they should want "legitimate" medicine. This infringes on their personal right to choose whether they want to treat their diabetes with insulin or with the root of the Papuan guava plant. What if they die because they picked the latter? Tough - it's the rule of the fittest. The market is only the reflection of society. If you live in a society where people believe in quack medicine, then of course the quack medicine industry will be large. If you try to fund legitimate medicine, that is social engineering, and it's Ron Paul's (I suppose) view that the government should not engage in social engineering. I'll repeat: it's a very logical and consistent opinion, which you may choose or not to agree with. To understand libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism, stop thinking that "WE" want or should want legitimate science - "WE" don't. In fact, there is no such thing as "WE", because "WE" implies an imaginary consensus.

Because there is no such thing as a complete consensus, by giving funding to certain domains, you are redistributing private property of individuals against their will, which is not something a legitimate state can do. Locke also talks about this, but I think a lot of libertarians go above and beyond what Locke called for. You'd have to go on and read the works of people like Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and the like. Ayn Rand I suppose also touched on this, but apparently she was a bit of a cult figure, so approach with caution.

I personally agree with parts of this but not all - I believe in a role for the state in society, albeit a diminished one. I do agree with you that the scientific elite should have a place at the top of the structure - in that sense I'm a bit of a technocrat. But, do understand where Ron Paul and his ilk are coming from. It's fascinating, and nowhere near as nonsensical as you seem to believe it is.

A large amount of economic philosophy is utter bunk.

DJ, DJ, DJ... come on. Surely you realize that this is nonsense. Economics is a social science, and there is not really such a thing as "bunk" social science. While social scientists do try to proceed in a scientific manner, and there is a certain methodology to respect, there are no certainties like there are in "hard" sciences. We gather data, analyse it and interpret it based on empirical knowledge, and in the end we can try to infer some predictions from it, but it's nigh-on impossible to be certain about future events like you can, say in physics (if I let go of this apple, it will fall to the ground because --> gravity). You may know the mythical social science that allows you to make predictions as "psychohistory" from Isaac Asimov's Foundation series - we unfortunately still haven't come up with that yet. A teacher in one of my first semester classes, when talking about using absolute words in our projects (like: when A happens, social group B will always act in this manner...), joked that we would become immeasurably rich if we could ever discover such a hard-and-fast law.

What is amusing is that neoclassical economics (the kind Ron Paul adheres to) often claim to have a scientific model, with equations that can be observed to be true over and over (a basic one is cost-benefit analysis; people are rational and only do something if the benefit is greater than the cost). The problem is that their equations have to operate "all other things being equal", ie without the interference of outside factors, and while it may be possible to remove outside factors in the case of a hard science like physics, it's rather impossible to do when considering the whole or even part of human society. At any rate, I believe, in neoclassical economics, funding for research is given by individuals called "entrepreneurs" who thereby attempt to identify potential demand that has gone unidentified up to then (and thereby make lots of money). Scientists can be entrepreneurs as well; if they believe they can discover something that will lead to even greater discoveries (like, I guess, what you were talking about) then nothing stops them from presenting those projects to people with capital (money) so they can further their research.

Like I said, I think this is how it goes; I'm not an economist and you certainly aren't either, but I guarantee you they have thought their model through, so please don't dismiss it offhand. I'm sure Keynesian (interventionist) economists have loads of criticism concerning R&D in a fully free market as well, but I really don't consider myself educated enough in the matter to tackle the subject.