This is the conclusion of my two-part series discussing why science would be better if it left government funding behind. In the first post, I discussed why government should not be given control of scientists’ work, what government have done when they did have this control, what they will continue to do, and how the system produces inferior science than a non-government-controlled system would. In Part 2, I discuss what the alternative is to government funding, and why that alternative would be better.
So what would be the alternative?
What would happen if the NIH, the other assorted agencies such as the Department of Energy, and most military/DARPA spending on this-could-be-used-against-someone-someday research were abolished tomorrow? Scientists might be poorer in the short run, but they– and science– would be better off in the long run. Companies would give grants to universities, just as they do now. Unlike government grants, many of these company grants have no strings attached, little to no red tape, and have built-in accountability– the companies simply want to employ a certain number of graduates from the university in question, and that’s how they determine whether the grant was successful. If government stopped with its grantmaking, there would be more of these. Since presumably the government would get smaller, corporate taxes would go down and they’d have more discretionary funds available for this type of grant. The bureaucracy inherent in a government grant would not be there, either, so the same amount of money could provide for more research. Private foundations also currently give a lot of money to universities, and they too would continue to do so, also helped by lower taxes. Philanthropists with billions at their discretion could make billion-dollar grants if they chose. Alumni would give to research, not just new buildings.
Private industry would pick up the slack. Most current medical discoveries are made by pharmaceutical companies hoping to find new drugs. Scientists right now must be tied to a huge research university, a corporation, or the government if they want a good job. Why can’t we have scientific cooperatives, foundations which hire scientists, organizations that scientists develop themselves to conduct and own their own research? Potential scientific entrepreneurs have less money (in a culture of endless regulation and steep taxation) if they did want to fund research of their own. This makes no sense when the free market can do better– the Gates Foundation shows this. However, why would private industry fund research now, when the government is all too willing to pay them to do it? The government subsidizes private companies in activities that they should be funding themselves and takes away the power of the market and the consumer to decide what is the best product. Private companies do donate to universities for research, but they don’t do as much as they would if the government hadn’t taken over that role.
How do I know that there is waste in the system? If you are a researcher with a lab that has funding, you know there is as well. The government not only has waste, it encourages waste through its policy of taking away funding if a researcher doesn’t use it all. The theory is that if you don’t use it, you must not need it and someone else does. Labs may not use all their money this year, but they may want it for next year, so they’re encouraged to spend on things they don’t really need. I had a friend a few years ago who was a buyer for a military base. She just bought things that they needed, all day, every day. The busiest time of the year was the month leading up to the September end of the fiscal year, when the base would buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of extra equipment, often in multiples, just so it wouldn’t lose any funding the next year.
Why would anyone do this to keep funding they might not even need? It’s such a bureaucracy applying and getting the funding in the first place that no one wants to risk losing any part of it. In the free market, looking out for your own self-interest is good; in the government, it’s bad.
The military and DARPA.
I also believe it hurts our military. Any time someone says the government came up with anything of merit, it came from DARPA, which has a relatively small amount of the Pentagon’s research funding. The difference is that it takes risks and acts a bit more like a start-up company experimenting with ideas than a government agency. It’s much more efficient than the NIH and could be a model to other government agencies. However, it’s not as good as it should be. Compared to a private organization, it has huge amounts of waste and an incredible number of really dumb ideas. If you have 100 crazy ideas, of course one of them will work out, but that’s no way to run a private company and of course, it’s no way to run a government agency, either.
Sure, someone should pay for fringe research that could result in invisible cloaks or mind control, or even bombs which cause the enemy to engage in homosexual orgies and forget about fighting. However, it shouldn’t be a taxpayer-financed military. If those technologies are actually viable, they’ll be worth a lot of money to whoever develops them, and people will be jumping at the chance to invent them. Let private industry develop them, shoulder the costs, and then we can buy it from them when it’s perfected. As it is, we pay for products to be developed– and for many more to not be developed– and then pay the contractor again for use of the item. The taxpayer, as with many things, gets hit on all sides while benefiting little. If we left it up to private industry to come up with this stuff, we may very well have invisibility cloaks by now.
While in college, I was walking to a football game with some friends, a little late, and heard a very soft sound. I looked up expecting to see a bird, and 50 feet above me was a Stealth bomber heading to the stadium for a fly-over. A minute later, it was over the stadium and everyone was roaring with approval. We all like technologies that keep us powerful like that, and the Stealth bomber is impressive. No one can deny that. It was created through DARPA.
The Stealth bomber is what allows us all to stomach the idea of letting the Pentagon have $90 billion in research funding each year. The space program is what allows us to give NASA $17 billion a year. However, even the Stealth bomber has its flaws, and the space shuttle has many even fatal flaws. Would we have gotten a man on the moon without the government? Yes, and we still will. The first person to build an airplane did it without government funding, the first person to fly across the Atlantic, Charles Lindbergh, did it to win a prize from a St. Louis philanthropist. There was no government funding or bureaucracy involved. The XPrize has given $10 million for the first team to achieve private space flight, and now the Google Lunar XPrize is going to pay $30 million for the first team that gets to the moon with a robotic mission that sends pictures and video. Someone will win it. Perhaps the next prize will be to send a person to the moon, and someone will achieve that. A private organization or institution along the nature of Bell Labs could have invented something better than the Stealth bomber, better than the space shuttle, in each case for less money, I’m sure of it. But why would it ever try, when the Pentagon spends close to $90 billion a year on research funding, $50,000 a second? Bell Labs and Abbott Labs have publicly stated that they will let the government come up with the long-term breakthroughs that they once excelled in. Why is that? The government bleeds money. What private company can compete with that? The best you can hope for are government contracts and grants… and oh, what contracts! In what other industry can you go $10 billion over budget and be two years late with a project and still get 90% of your bonus, or $849 million? Do you really think free enterprise can’t do better than that? The military-industrial complex is squashing real science and real innovation in favor of rewarding certain segments of society pursuing aims of certain special interests.
Start-ups and venture capital.
Dr. Dr. DeSimone mentioned at the lecture that his start-up company can do things that he can’t in the academic lab– it has more workers and can devote more money to trying out ideas and allow those workers to experiment with what will and will not work. It can also move forward more rapidly than a university lab when it does find something interesting. He also said that the private industry suffers from a lack of ideas; billions of dollars in venture capital are waiting to be claimed by those with good ideas, but (editorial comment) they’re probably being tied up by DARPA. Meanwhile, there’s no chance that a scientific start-up company is going to fund war rather than science.
Many people might say, “Private industry only cares about short term gains.” In true free market capitalism, that is untrue. A company wants to survive for the long haul and must conduct itself accordingly. However, in an atmosphere where quarterly reports are required by the SEC, CEOs certainly do have a reason to put off, cover up, and distort negative information to keep the stock price up for another quarter. They also don’t have to worry about being profitable in the long term because they can probably ask for a government bailout if anything really bad happens. In a true free market, none of that would exist and companies would have to keep themselves healthy to survive– to put a scientific spin on it, it’s a bit of Darwinism for corporations that we do not have right now. We give crutches to those who are certainly not the fittest. In addition, this argument matters little if what Drexler said at his talk is true (and I believe it is)– now, the government also relies only on short gains when allocating funding at the expense of long-term possibilities. The most PC, low-risk venture will be certain to gain funding while true creative research will be thrown to the side and refused– unless it has a possible military use, of course.
What if it doesn’t work out for these companies? What if they fail? That’s fine, some of them will. You will go through many bad ideas before you come to a good one in science, that’s just the way it is, but the market compensates for that as new companies start up. The taxpayer shouldn’t be on the hook for the losses, the business owners should be. Good ideas will succeed, bad ones will fail, and that’s the way the market goes. Things directly related to the military could still be funded, of course. The most successful military-related spinoffs are the Internet and GPS, and they are more related to military purposes than the many projects that have died a slow death at DARPA. In a free market of world superpowers, at least, the European Union’s Galileo system is going to be better and more accurate than GPS– and if the Europeans can do it better, you know private industry could. Competition is good. Our current system discourages any form of competition with government research.
Conclusion: Science is cool, and it deserves something better than the current system.
We shouldn’t just wait around taking leftover medical technology that trickles down from the military-industrial complex. We can make breakthroughs today, tomorrow, and in the future, without politicians in Washington or your state capital taking our own money from us and then dictating what we can research, how, and why, and what we can do in the meantime.
Science can do better. It deserves better.
Tags: nanotechnology immoral, government science funding, scientific funding, government science
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Libertarian Girl » Blog Archive » Why the Government Should Stay Out of Science, Completely
August 2nd, 2008