Jardine: Have you ever considered that user pays research will not and cannot provide adequately for basic research or longer range work? Branding government involvement as socialism is twaddle. Large swathes of research rely on a decision model which operates free of the immediate need for reward that typifies private ownership of research.

Privately funded research is extremely wasteful and unproductive because of the corollary, which is private ownership of the data, methods and knowledge thus generated. There can be no convincing argument in favour of private control and ownership of knowledge in a democratic society, but that is unavoidably implicit in privately funded and directed research. Example: Drug companies and their notorious penchant for self-serving uncritical and secret so-called research which is aimed not primarily at an improved world but at an improved bottom line through market dominance.

There is room for privately funded research, but we need much more than will ever be delivered by that means alone. Think: If privately funded research is tax deductable, does that make it publicly funded? Should that imply public input into what, when and how such research is conducted and public disclosure and ownership of the results? If not, why not?

There is a role for public involvement without the discussion degenerating into sloganeering and of derogatory terms such as "socialism" being used as though they are spears through the hearts of non-believers in the purity and efficiency of perfect markets, which any economist will confirm do not exist anywhere.

All markets need the guidance and occasional intervention of government in order to exist. In the past 6 years, public funds and plenty of them were used to support failed and fraudulent markets and privately owned fiefdoms, aka corporations. This was not socialism - it was socialising the debts of the few in order to maintain their control over the many. Where was the opposing voice from the economic so-called rationalists then?

JohnBennets
Interesting. By what rational principle do you decide whether the funding of a particular research or researcher is too little, too much, or just the right amount, considering the alternative employments of the same resources that had to be sacrificed for that purpose? By rational I mean, in terms of the evaluations of those who pay for or consume the service?

"Where was the opposing voice from the economic so-called rationalists then?"

It was here: http://www.mises.org

For example I respectfully submit the following would be a good primer on the whole subject: "The Bailout Reader" http://mises.org/daily/3128 . Please have a look.

It is self-contradictory to decry the social injustice of political handouts on the one hand, while simultaneously arguing the necessity and virtue of them on the other!

Exactly the same questions must be asked of the bailouts of banks and corporations, which in an unhampered market would fail for want of consumer support, as I am asking you of the support you advocate for research. Either on an unhampered market, support would be forthcoming, in which case coercion to obtain the funding is unnecessary, or it wouldn't, in which case, how do you justify such funding? ( Your assertions that it's necessary for adequate funding of basic research only begs the question how you define "adequate" and "basic" by some rational principle. Your arbitrary whim doesn't count as a rational principle, I'm afraid.)

The handouts of trillions taken from the productive class and given to political favourites are the actions of governments. They are the political expression of the idea that the socialisation of the means of production is necessary for a fairer and productive society. Whether or not it is called socialism could only make for a dry argument about semantics. I think that whatever it were called, the same logic, and the same (lack of) ethics and economic sense, and the same valuational chaos, must necessarily attend it.

What I'm asking is indeed by what rational principle you distinguish the handouts you and I in common disagree with, from those you advocate - because I'm denying that you can.

So ... what is it?

JohnBennetts
The reason you have no rational principle by which you can identify what research should be funded or not, or by which to distinguish rationally justified research from parasitic behaviour, is because such a rational principle doesn’t exist, because the possibility of it is removed by the fact of government’s intervention.

All the problems that Don describes with deciding what research to fund, disappear when it’s privately funded. Then we have the analogy with sporting competition that he wrongly asserts doesn’t apply to “research”. It applies to research alright. It just doesn’t apply to government-funded research.

This means that all your reasons in favour of state, and against voluntary funding of research are also wrong, for reasons I will now explain.

>“There can be no convincing argument in favour of private control and ownership of knowledge in a democratic society…”

You have it back to front. The starting point, even in your own terms of “a democratic society”, is not total government control of all private knowledge, and then politicians or bureaucrats graciously permitting privately funded research on arbitrary conditions. That starting point would also require unlimited political power. It would be impossible in fact.

And in principle, as we have just seen, you are completely unable to identify how it can be rationally justified. Also there is no reason why the political value of democracy, let alone total government power, should be presumed to trump the ethical and pragmatic superiority of freedom.

>“If privately funded research is tax deductable, does that make it publicly funded?”

It would only be so if the starting point were that all property is owned by the state, and then some exceptions were made to permit private ownership.

But tax deductibility is not some kind of compulsory socialization. It only exists because, if gross expenses were taxable instead of net, both the economy and the state would collapse. Private property does not become state property for no other reason than that the state must limit its own grasping to ensure the continuance of its confiscations. You’ve got it completely back to front again.

>“Branding government involvement as socialism is twaddle.”

You advocate presumptive government control of private knowledge and property, and then resile from the name of socialism? It’s your equivocation that’s twaddle.

>“[private funding] which is aimed not primarily at an improved world but at an improved bottom line”

To make this argument good, you would need to show that there’s something necessarily inconsistent between an improved world and an improved bottom line. You haven’t done so. Profit shows that the masses – society – value that product more highly because it satisfies their most urgent and important felt needs. In other words, it confers net benefits on them – society, which is precisely what you’re trying but failing to prove for state funding!

>“spears through the hearts of non-believers in the purity and efficiency of perfect markets”

The fact of imperfections in voluntary decisions, is no justification whatsoever for substituting imperfect decisions by a force-based monopoly of force.

But more importantly, you are trying to cast all the issue in terms of mere belief, as if logic or truth do not exist or are unknowable. As I have shown, that is not correct; - and it can hardly be the foundation of science, can it?

Voluntary provision has a rationality to it that is totally lacking in coerced provision. It supplies reason in terms of the evaluations and demonstrated voluntary preferences of the consumers and payers. And it supplies rationality as in ratio, comparability in units of a lowest common denominator of value, amenable to calculation. Voluntary transactions are also ethically preferably to coerced.

State provision removes all these virtues and has nothing to put in their place but arbitrary power and parasitic behaviour.

>“All markets need the guidance and occasional intervention of government in order to exist.”

That is the general issue in the argument you’ve just lost and can't defend. The parasitism you decry is because of the statism you advocate.

If your pre-suppositions about the superiority of governmental provision were true, it would apply to all goods and services, so you'd have to justify private property not socialism.

to John Bennetts and others,

I didn't smear all climate scientists. I said there was too much policy-based evidence making in the field. Look at the titles of the ARC funded projects in that field and you'll get a sense of it. So many seem to take for granted what has yet to be shown — that human activity is the predominant cause of global warming (not that there has been much for the last 16 years). If I am right about the projects, what does that tell us? That researchers, who need money, will construct their projects so that they are likely to get the funds they need. I don't think that leads to good science. That's all.

I've seen that phenomenon in other areas. Climate science is just the newest kid on the block— and there is a lot of money for it.