The Stephansdom cathedral is one of the central sights in Vienna. As the center of commerce and home to markets in Wien (German for “Vienna”) for centuries, the cathedral has grooves on its outside surface that served to standardize and regulate measurements throughout the centuries, according to Lonely Planet.

It may seem preposterous to us now, but it worked for centuries. Things can be regulated and standardized voluntarily, without government intervention. What an amazing concept.

The disgusting behavior of these people is bad enough on its own merit. However, I was surprised to learn that the WBC requests in advance– and in most cases actually receives– police protection before all its protests. I can understand why the WBC members (who are all relatives of its founder, Fred Phelps) are scared of bodily harm, but I don’t personally see why the police should provide this type of service pre-emptively. I’m going to participate in a protest of my own tomorrow, but I don’t expect police protection, and I didn’t demand it beforehand just in case I might need it.

The fact that police officers in all these cities are protecting the scum of Westboro Baptist Church rather than conducting actual police activities (such as fighting and preventing actual crime, for a start) is also disgusting to me. Why would the local governments in these cities grant the WBC’s request?

If the WBC is so concerned for its own safety, it should have only two options: 1.) don’t conduct their ridiculous protests in the first place and stay home, or 2.) pay for their own private security. Imagine that! A group actually paying their own way rather than expecting everyone else in society to foot the bill for them. It’s rarer and rarer these days.

In my opinion, the cities which grant police protection to Westboro Baptist Church are subsidizing their despicable protests. Without the pre-emptive police protection, WBC would probably not protest at all. They might not find all that traveling so affordable anymore.

We don’t have to infringe free speech to stop these slime from protesting. Just stop giving them their own personal, taxpayer-supplied bodyguards.

I present to you The Tree That Owns Itself, in Athens, Georgia.

One unfortunate aspect about The Tree That Owns Itself is that, while it is generally acknowledged to own itself, it is “accepted for care” by municipal authorities, which we all know means that it probably wouldn’t really be all that cared for (check out the trees and wildlife situation in the Soviet Union or Cuba, for extreme examples of this phenomenon). However, the local government has thankfully embraced libertarian ideas and has mostly turned the care of the tree over to locals: “… local government and the owners of the adjacent property jointly serve as ‘stewards’ for the care of the tree, while Athens’ Junior Ladies’ Garden Club serves as its ‘primary advocate.’”

Why would the Junior Ladies’ Garden Club be a better “primary advocate” than the Athens municipal government? This is the very heart of the libertarian views on how to save the environment. The club has a special affinity for and knowledge of gardening, it is a private group that must maintain its reputation in order to maintain membership (and therefore it would be highly unlikely it would let the tree die, for example). In addition, the local homeowners also have an interest in keeping the value of the tree as a tourist attraction that increases the value of their properties and the look of their neighborhood.

The history of the tree is a lesson in libertarianism as well. The marble marker describing the unique history of the tree (which is now the Son of the Tree That Owns Itself), the fence surrounding it, and the soil was donated by a philanthropist in 1906. Despite being in the city’s right of way, in the time between the death of the old tree and the planting of the new tree the lot was not cared for properly by the city– the nearby house at that time was vacant, with no homeowner to attend to the lot’s needs, and the city didn’t care that the lot had fallen into disrepair.

“Privatization” does not necessarily mean “corporations”; it often means private groups and individuals doing what is best for society by doing what they love to do at no cost to the taxpayer, and elements of nature which can be as content as The Tree That Owns Itself appears to be.

The Tree That Owns Itself, Son of the Tree That Owns Itself, libertarian environment, privatization

• The current system often benefits the rich and special interests, not the poor.
• The “War on Drugs” disproportionately places poor people in prison for non-violent crimes, separating families and ruining lives.
• The inflation tax is a tax no politician will ever speak of, a hidden tax that affects the poor and middle class and benefits the rich. It’s the tax normal people feel every day when they wonder why things are costing more.
• Our monetary system caused the Great Depression and causes boom-and-bust cycles which hurt the economy.
• Private organizations have welfare systems that are more generous, more efficient, and better than government welfare– but private organizations can’t compete with a tax-based system. If there was no government welfare, private groups would step up and help people who need it.
• Subsidies to certain foods cause food prices to rise, which hurts poor people, and especially those surviving on foods stamps, hard. As a result of this policy, junk food goes down in price and more sustaining foods go up in price. This is why many poor people are obese. Private groups with welfare systems provide healthy, nutritious food as part of their program.
• Deregulation would allow more businesses to be started by and for poor people.
• Occupational licensing laws prevent poor people from opening businesses.
• Health care costs would be lower.
• No form of socialism has ever gotten rid of poverty (yes, even in Sweden!)

“There has never been a tax system beneficial for the poor.” — Economics professor Ken Schoolland

The current system benefits the rich and special interests; the poor do not benefit as much as they would in a libertarian society.

First of all, we have to look at the system. We currently have a system where we supposedly act as Robin Hood and tax everyone to give money to poor people. That’s not the way it works out, though. Poor people get taxed too, often very aggressively– income tax, sales taxes, business taxes if they want to open up a shop, licenses they have to get, gas taxes, tolls, fees, property taxes if they want to own even a small house, and the inflation tax, which I’ll discuss in a bit. All of these taxes affect poor people more than the rich, so they are regressive, with the possible exception of income tax.

In a non-libertarian system, rich people often make a net gain from the government, because the money the government gives them can be more than they pay in taxes. That’s what the system is supposed to do for poor people, but it’s what it actually does for rich people. Many people take welfare without needing it, figuring that they pay taxes, so why not take the benefits?

Income tax can also be regressive, because rich people can afford accountants who fiddle with the numbers until the person doesn’t owe anything, they pay their spouse and kids a salary, they take tax credits and deductions, they donate to charity, they put money in accounts which they don’t owe taxes on, and in some cases, they even send their money overseas to a tax haven. Poor people can’t do that. Rich people have the money to form corporations which can pay for lobbyists to get corporate welfare from the government, which unlike individual welfare, can run to billions of dollars. It’s not poor people getting these billions.

“The net effect of our policies, the evidence for which is overwhelming, is that we are redistributing income up.” — Daniel Cay Johnston, Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves At Government Expense (And Stick You With The Bill)

“One America that pays the taxes, another America that gets the tax breaks.” — John Edwards

Sure, I don’t fault Edwards for using the kind of tax system he did to get certain liability waivers. However, if he really believed in “Two Americas,” he could have written out a $738,000 check to the US Treasury and said to use it for Medicare. He did not.

Robert Higgs writes:

“In fact, the overwhelming portion—more than 85 percent—of all government transfer payments is not ‘means-tested,’ that is, not reserved for low-income recipients. The biggest share goes to the elderly as pensions and Medicare benefits, and anyone over 65 years old, rich and poor alike, can receive these benefits. Today people over 65 have the highest income per person and the highest wealth per person of any age group in the United States. Federal transfer payments to farmers present an even more extreme case of giving to those who are already relatively well off. In 1989, for example, the federal government paid about $15 billion to farmers in direct crop subsidies, and 67 percent of the money went to the owners of the largest 17 percent of the farms—in many cases payments to farmers are literally welfare for millionaires. It is simply a hoax that, as a rule, government is taking from the rich for the benefit of the poor. Even people who believe in the rectitude of redistribution à la Robin Hood ought to be troubled by the true character of the redistribution being effected by governments in America today.”

Finally, you can’t really fault politicians for acting this way. We elect them, and we keep electing them despite their behavior. We seem to like it when a politician says one thing and does another. We seem to accept it when a politician, proclaiming a love for poor people, takes advantage of tax loopholes to get out of the taxes they’re trying to increase. Since we reward them for it, a politician has no reason to actually do something for the common person and not reward his or her rich cronies.

You can see why there is a real incentive on politicians’ part to convince you that you’re better off under the current system than you would be if it didn’t exist and get you to actually extend that system. The idea that we receive more back from taxes than we put in really makes no sense (when you keep in mind all the foreign aid and nation-building dollars we spend overseas, we’d be in a much bigger debt than we are now if we all got back more than we put in), but it’s deeply entrenched. Everyone wants to desperately feel good about themselves when they are forced to pay all these taxes, so they like to imagine there’s a reward of fabulous roads and schools at the end of the rainbow.

There are still poor people in Europe.

If socialism can end the problems of the poor, I ask you this: why are there still poor people in Europe, which has both high taxation rates and very high social welfare transfers? I used to live in Europe, and I’d see more poor people as I walked down the street in London than I ever have in New York City. Their high taxes, the NHS, and other social systems have not prevented people from being poor– in fact, the neighborhood in which my university was located was a very poor immigrant neighborhood in the East End filled with “council housing” (housing projects) which was pretty similar to many immigrant neighborhoods in, for instance, New York City. Ask the Algerian immigrants in the banlieues in France if France’s “social net” has helped them, or if it in fact has made it harder for them to find jobs. Do US states with higher taxation rates and higher rates of welfare see an end to poverty? No, but taxation goes higher and higher, hurting the middle-class and small business owners the most.

The “War on Drugs.”

The United States has the largest prison population in the world, with a higher percentage of people in prison than in any other industrialized nation– and our prison population isn’t made up of rich people. A large percentage of our prisoners are there for non-violent drug crimes, stemming from the federal “War on (ed. note: Some) Drugs.” This campaign has meant that poor people are more likely to be convicted and spend time in prison for non-violent drug crimes than rich people. A person caught with the same amount of crack cocaine– the drug of choice for poor people– is sentenced to a much longer sentence than someone with that same amount of powder cocaine, a drug only rich people can afford.

The Tax You Never Heard of– the Inflation Tax.

A huge aspect of what can hurt poor people has been called “the inflation tax.” I used to have no real problem with inflation; sure, the prices of everything would go up year-to-year, but I figured that everyone would be paid more, so it would be a system of “nothing gained, nothing lost” for everyone involved. I was surprised when I discovered this was not the case. In fact, when the government “lowers interest rates” (while claiming, with the media’s help, that this is a good thing for the nation), the only people who benefit are on Wall Street. They buy the government’s bonds at lower rates, they see the extra printed money first, they enjoy the rising stock prices. Meanwhile, inflation of the cost of goods hits poor people before their wages catch up; they’re paying higher prices for goods while making less money. The government also hands over this newly-printed and not-yet-circulated money to the military industrial complex and other large government contractors, who enjoy the money while before it has caused inflation and later pass it on to middle-class workers who then get only the real, inflation-adjusted value of those dollars. It’s a travesty on our federal government’s part. Hardworking seniors and others who don’t play the stock market and instead have savings accounts are also penalized by the lowering of interest rates– they make less money back on their accounts. Those pensioners who are on Social Security are supposed to have their income adjusted for inflation, but the government only calculates that to be about 3% a year– far less than the approximately 12% real inflation that other groups have found that the American economy has. That means that we all are losing 9% a year in real income, even if it is adjusted for 3% inflation first. This all results in a transfer of wealth from the poor and middle classes to the people trading billions at hedge funds.

The inflation tax is perhaps the most interesting tax because, while they feel it every day, most people don’t realize it exists and politicians are able to ignore it. Let’s see if Barack Obama ever mentions the inflation tax; I bet you a billion in just-off-the-press Federal Reserve notes that he most certainly will not. That would require admitting that government spending often benefits big business rather than little people.

Inflation goes on to hurt poor and working-class families in another way: because dollars are worth less, they get paid more in dollar amounts (although not in real dollars, once the amount is adjusted for inflation– they’re probably actually making less than they were pre-inflation). The hardworking family then gets pushed into a higher tax bracket and have to pay higher income taxes– all on money that has gone down in value! Income tax brackets do not allow for inflation in their calculations, just dollar amounts. As a response, the family might call for increased government spending– which may provide temporary relief, but of course begins the inflation tax cycle all over again and causes the family to again suffer more in the end.

Our monetary system causes boom-and-bust cycles and depressions, which are hard on the poor.

Our welfare society sprang up during the Great Depression. It may not have come into being if it weren’t for the massive loss of jobs during that era– a loss which was caused not by capitalism, but by monetary policy of the Federal Reserve itself, as Milton Friedman first explained and Ben Bernanke later agreed. So, the Great Depression was not a natural consequence of capitalism, but was caused by a central bank trying to regulate capitalism, and the welfare state– also the government trying to rein in capitalism– was the response.

Private organizations don’t do as much as they would in a libertarian world.

What did poor people do before the Depression? How did things even exist? First of all, many of our most successful hospitals were started not through government money as they would be today, but through private donations and by churches. Many of our most beautiful libraries were created not through government money, but by donations from Andrew Carnegie.

Rather than the poor getting government handouts (or the rich scamming for government handouts), churches and private organizations were in charge of helping the poor. Why is that a better system? Churches aren’t going to give money to rich people or to drug addicts who will just use it for their next fix– but the government certainly hasn’t been vetting for any of that, and that type of waste takes away from poor people who truly need help with their basic needs. Private charity is based on relationships and is self-vetting. This works out well in regards to the missions of many Christian churches, along with most major religions, because the God they base their theology on said, “Do unto others as you would have done unto you,” and specifically said to help the poor.

“And remember in all things the poor and the needy, the sick and the afflicted, for he that doeth not these things, the same is not my disciple.” — Joseph Smith

As one example of what a private welfare system might look like, the Church of Latter-Day Saints has an extensive, efficient, and successful welfare system for its members and for others in society, including international victims of tsunamis and other natural disasters. People in those countries don’t have public welfare systems to rely on, so private organizations take up the balance. The Mormon welfare system employs its recipients in its warehouses and stores, helping them help others and giving them job skills in the meantime. It is all done on an absolutely voluntary basis by the Mormon church, with better results than the state and federal welfare systems run by countries: 30% of the recipients are able to leave the Welfare Plan each year, and the average time on welfare is only four months. Food, clothing, household needs, home repairs, skills training, help with job searches and resumes, addiction recovery, adoption assistance and, if needed, shelter, are provided free. Many companies donate to the 751 warehouses, which serve 13 million people in America. Anyone who wants help can get it from the Mormon system, and donations to it by LDS members are totally voluntary. However, the LDS or any other private welfare system has no incentive to expand more than it is today when government options exist as well.

Are the Mormons the only group that does this sort of private charity? Margaret Thatcher noted in her memoirs, “My old constituency of Finchley has a large Jewish population. In the thirty three years I represented it I had never had a Jew come in poverty and desperation to any one of my constituency surgeries. They had always been looked after by their own community.” Private groups do provide welfare while the government does, and they would provide more if the government no longer did.

A clear advantage to the nature of private giving over a system of taxation is that those who give to private charities derive pleasure from helping the poor, and the poor are not taxed to benefit themselves down the line. Private giving wouldn’t have to be done by churches; there could be specific anti-poverty groups that want to help the poor and do a better job than the government can, just like the Mormons. Since more than one of these organizations would spring up to correspond to the demand once the government got out of the business of welfare, poor people would even have a (gasp!) choice in who they got welfare from.

Healthier forms of welfare and no subsidies on certain unhealthy foods.

One particular note that is interesting to me is that the Mormon storehouses feature healthy foods, fruits and vegetables and canned goods, not packaged foods. However, if you have food stamps and are looking for the cheapest form of the most calories, you’ll most likely be led to the junk food aisle. Healthy foods are more expensive than unhealthy foods, and if you want to make your welfare check go as far as it can you’ll probably buy junk food. Michael Pollan has noted that this is because of our farm bill, granting subsidies to certain (very wealthy) industries at the expense of others, which makes our food more expensive than it otherwise would be.

Some people say to me, What about starving people? People wouldn’t starve in a libertarian society, and in America today, “the most reliable predictor of obesity in America today is a person’s wealth… So how is it that today the people with the least amount of money to spend on food are the ones most likely to be overweight?”

“If anything, the greatest health problem faced by ‘the poor’ in Western countries is morbid obesity rather than starvation.” — Ben O’Neill

Deregulation would increase competition and bring prices down.

In a libertarian society, we would have deregulation. What does that mean? Let’s start by giving an example from today. Let’s say that I have an idea for a car– it’s safe, it’s environmentally friendly, it’s less expensive than a typical $25,000 sedan of today. What could I do? I can’t start a car company; the car industry is so highly regulated, with expensive and labarythine restrictions on every little aspect, that it has huge barriers to newcomers. If Olds or Ford wanted to start their companies today, they wouldn’t be able to with all the restrictions they’d be able to meet. You’d need billions of dollars to start a car company today. As a result, we don’t have a car that runs just on electric, we get old and stale car designs, and we get car companies struggling to meet their health care costs, let alone worrying about creating new and innovative automobiles.

A person once semi-joked that the thing an established company wants most is to have their industry regulated. When it’s regulated, the companies will basically write those laws (in their favor, of course) and will prevent any newcomers from ever coming up to challenge them.

Many people might say, “Those restrictions are there for the public’s own good. It keeps them safe.” However, I beg to differ. Due to these restrictions, the public has fewer choices in car companies, fewer choices in cars, and almost all cars look and feel the same. It’s not a free market, and it’s not as good as it could be in a true market catering to the consumer. In a free market, there would be options that would spring up for safety tests, safety of design, and other car rankings just as there is today with JD Edmonds and Consumer Reports. These could be non-profit, third-party sources like CR or they could be for-profit like Edmonds. There is no need for all these government restrictions on car companies and the building and making of cars. Did Japan start out with these sorts of regulations? No, and Toyota and Honda are recognized to be a higher, more reliable quality than our own domestic car companies can produce.

So, in a system of deregulation, there would be more competition and goods and services would be cheaper. Health care would be less expensive, it would take less money for schools to create a better product in a libertarian world, gasoline would be less expensive as would alternative energies, and housing would also be less expensive.

Occupational licensing laws would be abolished.

Have you ever wanted to start a business and then realized it would be too difficult or too expensive? Well, that’s the effect of today’s society. A friend of mine started a business in New Jersey and never made a dime with it, yet had to pay thousands of dollars in fees and taxes to the state of New Jersey anyway. This is a consequence of our tax-and-keep-taxing-more society and a real detriment to private enterprise and entrepreneurship.

As mentioned above, deregulation would allow a lower bar of entry into regulated industries, which would increase competition, choice, and — for those interested in consumer safety in particular– safety in those industries.

Let’s say Frank wants to open a barber shop on his back porch and charge his friends to cut their hair. First, he would have to incorporate as a business (possibly $1,000 in expense), get a local business license (~$200), find out whether his neighborhood is zoned for it and then try to get the zoning laws changed (into the thousands), then he has to pay federal and state taxes on every nickel he earns. It’s no wonder Frank never tries to get his business off the ground and instead decides to remain on welfare. It’s much easier.

Frank would be able to achieve his dream of a barber shop on his porch in a libertarian society. His customers would be happy they could get a decent rate on a cut, and if they thought the place wasn’t clean or was unhealthy in some way, they would have a number of options: they could either deal directly with Frank on this, they could simply go to another barber, they could report Frank to a third party such as a local Consumer Reports-style organization or a Ralph Nader-type local consumer advocate, warning other customers that Frank’s barber shop was dirty, or they could decide that they didn’t care and keep going to Frank’s barber shop anyway.

If enough of Frank’s customers decided that they didn’t like his hygiene practices, Frank would be out of business and out of luck, so if he cares about staying open he’d clean everything to a level probably exceeding many of today’s health codes. Independent ranking/reporting/monitoring agencies would spring up in a libertarian society, perhaps even going undercover as clients of Frank’s themselves. They’d have low startup costs due to all the reasons outlined above, especially low taxation.

Health Care.

In a libertarian society, health care would be less expensive. HMOs are currently required by the federal government. Before mandated HMOs and “managed care,” poor people were treated at church-run or private hospitals for free and by doctors for free (an example of this is Congressman Ron Paul, an MD who gave free medical care to those who needed it.) Costs for an entire doctor’s visit then would be less than a Medicare or Medicaid co-pay of today. We do not have a free market in health care today. Many people think the rising cost of health care is directly related to the amount of healthcare the government provides and the less competition that can spring up to meet demand.

In a libertarian world, people might have health insurance for surgeries or in case of a health crisis down the road, but they wouldn’t necessarily have the type of insurance people have today, where companies spend 40% of their budget on advertising and routinely deny claims. There would be more insurance companies and more choice on the part of consumers. Routine medical care would be given by individual doctors and cost less then the ever-increasing Medicare co-pay we have now. More pharmaceutical companies would be creating more and more innovative drugs, and some of them would compete on price as well, so you would have less expensive alternatives to many types of prescription drugs.

rich and poor libertarian society, poor people libertarian, welfare system libertarian, taxation libertarian, free markets, Mormon welfare system, LDS welfare, private welfare systems, libertarian health care, deregulation, occupational licensing, Eric Schmidt, Google, greed, Steve Jobs, Terry Semel, Yahoo

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

“The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by federal government project allocation, and the power of money, is ever present, and is gravely to be regarded.” — President Dwight D. Eisenhower

The government should stay out of science completely. Science, scientists, taxpayers, and the world would be better off for it. Research scientists are usually keen on increased government funding for science, and this is understandable– it seems to be in their self-interest to do so. However, I think that when government gets involved in science, science actually suffers, and the public (who do usually benefit the most when good science happens) is charged for it all while achieving inefficient results.

True innovators are stifled, Nobel Prize winners are turned down for funding and their ideas called “not worthy of pursuit,” and meanwhile, scientists willing to toe the party line publish reams of inconsequential, NIH-funded research just to get published and keep their jobs– perhaps while stifling those dreams of what they truly would prefer to be working on. The government takes perfectly innocuous scientific discoveries such as fertilizers and uses them against the enemy of the moment, funding research that is often only nominally related to actual defense (at the rate of $50,000 a second) and actually giving strong consideration to “gay bombs” while not providing body armor to soldiers or providing them proper medical care when they return with injuries. It is inefficient and unable to govern its own budget, let alone scientific priorities.

When science goes against the government status quo, there is every incentive on the government’s part to misrepresent, cover up, or ban the information in question and little accountability to prevent them from doing so. Scientists spend time on government panels, at taxpayer expense, produce findings that are ignored or reviled, endlessly writing grants, reports and peer reviews and spending less time in the lab, while researchers face the uncertainty and red tape of government funding from year-to-year. A hierarchy of universities is created, needing ever more and more funding at the expense of smaller ones, attracting more and more students and raising tuition rates every year to pay for it all– while probably not even paying the grad students who are actually doing the teaching more than a small allowance. As an aside, a few days ago I attended a lecture by Eric Drexler, the inventor of nanotechnology, which was held at one of the nation’s top research universities and had a decent but not a huge audience. Perhaps the postdocs, grad students, and scientists were at home working on their NIH applications.

In his talk, Drexler asked, “How many minds, how many years?” about the priorities of government funding for science. My answer is “every mind it can get, forever.” It will not get better. The government is fundamentally incapable of providing adequate, fair, and non-biased funding for science.

It gives government too much power.

First of all, science and government’s aims and methods are fundamentally at complete odds with each other– science is rational, following certain rules, cautious and focused on facts, constantly looking for the truth. Government has an annoying tendency to be made up of people who benefit from telling multiple truths to different constituencies and generally don’t care how things are, as long as they seem a certain way– facts are negotiable. Perception is everything in politics, while science is all about facts.

When you give the government a power, you are saying to the public that you trust the government with that power. That’s just how it works. You are giving up control. When scientists give the government power over their work, they are endorsing what the government eventually does with it. As we allow the executive branch to take more and more unconstitutional power, we are encouraging one person to dictate scientific policy. This person, I guarantee, will not be a scientist or even know the basic tenets of science beyond high school. They won’t know a quark from a buckyball. They certainly don’t know better than scientists what should be studied and how, or they’d be doing the scientific work themselves. Our system lets politicians dictate science and lets scientists think they’re dictating politics. That’s why we have scientific advisers, right? Yes, and alas, the president chooses his or her own scientific advisers; most of the time, the power-hungry people at the top prefer to hire people with similar views for these sorts of cushy government jobs.

We can know all these things by simply looking back at presidential scientific policies. The government has a tendency to distort, malign, and ignore science when the research is not compatible with the administration’s own aims. Scientists have been directed to leave information out of official government reports. Ask the physicist William Happer, who was fired as head of the Department of Energy because he was “philosophically out of tune” with the Clinton administration (he was fired over the objections of Senate Democrats). He disagreed with whatever the official line of the moment was, so he lost his government science job. Bush has done the same thing, and so will our next president, and the next, and the next. Whether you agree with Gore or Clinton or Reagan or Bush doesn’t matter; if you are a government scientist or a government-funded scientist, just wait a few years and there will be a president in power who doesn’t agree with whatever you think. They will not hesitate to fire you… the precedent has certainly been set. When you give a president you like this power, you are also giving a president you don’t like this power.

Any scientist employed by the government, if they can even pass the necessary political litmus test first, is opening themselves to this risk. Happer described how scientific policy was decided under the Clinton-Gore administration: “When you ask this gang overseeing ozone depletion and global warming how much two plus two is, they first ask, ‘Why do you want to know?’ Then you say, ‘Well, I’m interested in finding out what’s happening to the ozone layer, and I thought the answer would help.’ Then they say, ‘Well, how much do you want it to be?’”

An online blogger was recently given a journalism award for reporting on the story of the United States attorneys and the “pattern of federal prosecutors being forced from office for failing to do the Bush administration’s bidding.” Do you think that people put in power who have such little respect for United States attorneys will have any more respect for research scientists? Could research scientists be forced from universities if their research interests don’t match those of the government’s? I think it’s quite likely. Even private universities accept so much federal funding that they feel they can’t even get rid of military recruiters on campus when they want to for threat of losing their federal “welfare checks.” Although public universities operate under a Board of Trustees or Board of Regents, who appoints those trustees? The governor is usually a member, and the governor or legislature usually appoints members, often those who have done political favors for the governor.

Some Democrats out there might argue that only Republican lawmakers have been guilty of this type of wrongdoing. This is not true. In 1979, a federal study of the effects of Agent Orange was abandoned by the CDC; the American Legion and other veterans’ groups sued the federal government, alleging that it was purposely attempting to conceal the harmful effects of Agent Orange on Vietnam soldiers, due to both the huge health costs it would then have to pay for the vets and to shield the companies responsible for the poison. Who was the president in 1979? Nobel Peace Prize winner Jimmy Carter. Twenty years later, officials from the American Legion continued to criticize the Pentagon under President Bill Clinton for what they called a continued cover-up and official denial of the effects of Agent Orange. And of course, Agent Orange and other “rainbow herbicides” were approved for use under Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Another Democrat and Peace Prize winner, Al Gore, is guilty of the same crime: global warming expert James Hansen of NASA, who unlike Happer did agree with Gore on climate change and greenhouse gases, still says that Gore demanded certain answers, even when the science didn’t jibe: “Under the Clinton-Gore administration, you did have occasions when Al Gore knew the answer he wanted, and he got annoyed if you presented something that wasn’t consistent with that. I got a little fed up with him, but it was not institutionalized the way it is now.” Ironically, Dr. Hansen has himself criticized government officials who do not go out of the bounds of their legislated duties, thus further propagating the system of rogue officials that he claims he is against.

Annoyance by politicians will always be institutionalized eventually. Governments always take more and more power and rarely give it back. Yes, corruption in regards to scientific fact has been a common theme through almost all federal governments in the US in modern times, both Democratic and Republican. Nobel Prize-winning biologist David Baltimore was not just referring to the current administration when he said the problems with government interference stemmed from a “theory of government”– that the executive branch has unilateral power to do as it pleases. Our next president will think this, too.

Only scientists should be deciding scientific policy.

We have a democratic republic form of government, which means that the majority often gets its way even if that way is bad– think slavery, women not being allowed to vote until 80 years ago, Japanese-Americans being sent to internment camps, segregated education. Quite frankly, the majority doesn’t know what it’s doing a lot of the time (and I would say, most of the time, because we don’t yet have a libertarian government). A recent study found that more than 70% of Americans have decided that nanotechnology is morally unacceptable. These are the same people who oppose stem cell research from embryos and genetically modified foods, but at least there’s a semblance of a reason for those objections.

In this case, they obviously don’t even know anything about nanotechnology (although they say they do) because while objecting to the science itself, they tell the researchers that they don’t mind what it has brought to us, such as stain-resistant Dockers, and they don’t mind future developments such as incredibly small computers. That’s right, they don’t know what it is, and yet they are willing to ban it just based on the name containing the word “technology” and a description of it containing the words “atom” and “molecular,” and these are the people who will elect our succeeding presidents and whom scientists are begging to be put in charge of our national scientific policies. I thought scientists were, well, smarter than that.

It funds what the government wants to fund.

When the government is in charge of funding and allocating funds, it controls what research scientists can do. If AIDS and cancer research is the “It” funding that members of Congress want to get re-elected this year, and you’ve spent your whole life dedicated to the many worlds theory, well, you’re just out of luck, aren’t you? You’d better find a way to make those many worlds attractive to the average American voter who’s never even heard of quantum physics, pronto, or even better, the industries that make up the backbone of what goes on in Washington, or you can say goodbye to your funding. This is perhaps one of the largest reasons why government funding has to end. Things that have immediate consequences to people– usually some type of biology or chemistry research– will get rained with cash while those in sciences like astronomy or physics or zoology or archeaology, a bit more esoteric and not necessarily aimed at curing diseases, will suffer. Einstein probably wouldn’t have been able to get funding from the NIH for his preferred research topics. That whole E=whatever thing isn’t sexy enough or popular with voters; it wouldn’t make the cut. All would not have been lost for Einstein the modern era, though: the Pentagon, of course, would welcome him into the lab to build a nuclear bomb.

It creates a cycle of status-quo research.

Why would researchers go along with this absurd system of having to achieve government approval of their research? The idea sounds like it would be at home in the 1960s-era Soviet Union and nowhere else. At universities in the United States, tenure is important– you can’t get fired, your job is protected, and you’re better respected if you’ve gained tenure at a university than if you have not. Tenure is usually granted depending on how much research you’ve done and what you’ve published. A professor who doesn’t try to tailor his or her research to make it low-risk, marketable to the government, and easily publishable could be faced with the high cost of getting fired. There’s a big incentive to just go with the latest trend in research, publish a paper, even if it covers ground that’s mostly been covered before, and then go on to the next trendy area of research that is also sure to be funded.

This fundamentally distorts what is being researched and published and is highly detrimental to science. One of last October’s Nobel Prize winners, Dr. Mario Capecchi, had his research turned down by the NIH for years before they finally conceded that it was worthy; they had maintained it would never work and refused to fund it. How many researchers out there now, faced with the same bureaucracy and centralized source of funding, decide that they need tenure too much to persist with their idea (perhaps even Nobel-worthy, as Capecchi’s was) and move on to a sure thing for funding, such as AIDS research?

“You could set up a foundation with an annual endowment of thirty million dollars. Research workers in need of funds could apply for grants, if they could make a convincing case. Have ten committees, each composed of twelve scientists, appointed to pass on these applications. Take the most active scientists out of the laboratory and make them members of these committees. …First of all, the best scientists would be removed from their laboratories and kept busy on committees passing on applications for funds. Secondly the scientific workers in need of funds would concentrate on problems which were considered promising and were pretty certain to lead to publishable results. …By going after the obvious, pretty soon science would dry out. Science would become something like a parlor game. …There would be fashions. Those who followed the fashions would get grants. Those who wouldn’t would not.” — Leo Szilard, Manhattan Project scientist, when asked how the growth of scientific research could be slowed, 1961

It distorts scientific priorities.

In his lecture, Drexler lamented the over-funding of research he said is trendy but that he thinks little long-term promise, such as fusion power. He implied that at the same time, nanotechnology, which promises to be a revolutionary technology when perfected, is under-funded. Over-funding of a not-so-great idea and under-funding of a great idea would never happen in the free market. The best ideas would get the most money, the worst ideas wouldn’t get money. It wouldn’t be based on who you know or what the voters like this year or what the latest scientific buzzwords are. Dr. Drexler said that every funding body (and university) comes to the table with its own agenda, and if it has pre-conceived, unscientific notions such as “gray goo” or other fairy tales about nanotechnology, nanotechnology simply won’t get funded or researched. Once these types of myths are out there, they’re difficult to get rid of.

According to Dr. Drexler, the “hysteria” surrounding false ideas about nanotechnology has set the research timetable back at least 10 years from what it should be. He said that the government has ignored funding for important fundamentals like protein synthesis development while it instead funds “a probe to Mars, a plasma future machine, and one day of war.” He asked “how many minds and how many years” it would take for the government to get its act together. It’s probably no coincidence that Drexler has left academia to join nanotechnology companies instead.

True innovation is stifled.

This type of bureaucratic attitude in denying funding to things that are not “safe” or guaranteed to work the first time, using the latest “in” techniques and technologies that appeal to voters, is fundamentally flawed and is devastating to scientific research. The best scientific research is done by an innovator with a spark of an idea. The best NIH funding goes to a well-connected researcher with plenty of postdocs at a “name” university who has previously published many mainstream, amenable papers and is therefore a “sure thing.” However, the best scientific innovations were not discovered this way. Einstein never had to play that game.

“The idea behind the MacArthur Prize is that Einstein could not have written a grant application saying he was going to discover the theory of relativity. You can’t write a proposal saying you’re going to discover something you don’t know exists. Einstein needed to be free, and so do future Einsteins.” — J. Roderick MacArthur, son of the founders of the MacArthur Prize

Allowing scientists to be “reviewed” in the way the NIH does, prior to conducting the experiments, automatically rules out many kinds of research that have historically been vital. Anything that goes against currently accepted, mainstream science is likely to be denied. The reviewer brings along his or her own personal and scientific biases and will not think twice about denying funding to the proposal in question, although it could be groundbreaking research that changes the way scientists think. Galileo wouldn’t have made it past the scientific reviewers and funders of the day– his ideas would have been too out there, too crazy, too impossible.

It creates uneven distortions in the university system and prevents competition from independent scientists.

Universities probably also like the system because in order to qualify for NIH and other types of government funding, a scientist must be linked with a university or a similar type of organization. According to Joseph DeSimone, the top 20 universities get 1/3 of federal R&D funding. A hierarchy is established, and top scientists can’t venture too far outside of it or they lose certain funding options. DeSimone said in the Drexler lecture, “It’s a cliff [for funding] if you’re not in the top 20.” Steven Pinker couldn’t open his own laboratory and apply for NIH funding on a type of language research that Harvard didn’t approve of. No, he would have to stay at Harvard if he wanted to receive funding from the government and do what they wanted him to do. These huge universities are themselves large bureaucracies prone to waste and high overhead costs. Therefore, it’s possible that even fewer dollars go to Pinker’s research than if Pinker opened up his own shop and started taking donations. The current system favors universities over the individual researcher, so they have no reason to try to change it, even if science suffers. Universities are often a haven for unconventional thinking, but the government is not– and more and more, the government holds the university’s pursestrings.

Scientific panels’ findings are often distorted and used to argue the government’s agenda.

In many cases, scientific advisory panels’ findings against something are used to argue the government’s case for something. More commonly, advisory panel recommendations are simply ignored. Science just can’t win in these battles. By saying that the findings for are direct from the government panel, people will listen and will never dig deeper and find the true story. In these cases, which are more numerous than you may think, having the panel in the first place and being used as a tool to spread disinformation was worse than not addressing the issue at all.

The government will use your research for things you don’t intend– think Manhattan Project.

Many scientific discoveries can be used for either good or bad– that has been true since a human first figured out how to start a fire. Scientists like to think that their research will be used for good and to better humanity. Unfortunately, when the government is paying, the government can use it for what it wants and that is often bad. Very, very bad. Remember that Agent Orange was tested by government labs before it was used in Vietnam. No one knows what the results of those tests were exactly, but they were quite probably ignored.

Dr. Joseph DeSimone, a panelist at the Drexler lecture, said that he often works with DARPA, and the agency is constantly looking not just at the positive but also the negative ways to use research– on the enemy, as a weapon or a tool in warfare, and also on civilians, for tagging, tracking, and monitoring. Any scientist using government money for their research is leaving it open to the government to do with as it chooses, be it good or bad. As with any government agency, it has little accountability built in (although it is better than other Pentagon agencies), so it’s easy to find thousands of old projects that didn’t work out for DARPA for any one that actually made the cut.

It hurts students and education in general.

What about students of science? They benefit from these magic government dollars that help them with research, right? Well, not exactly. Researchers spend so much time writing grant applications and submitting them in triplicate that they don’t have much time for teaching actual students anymore, and universities spend so much time chasing federal research dollars that they don’t really pay too much attention to undergrads once they’re at the school. They let the TAs take care of that. The massive amounts of NIH funding that even private universities get create a hierarchy among funded schools– — and allow these schools to draw students away from smaller colleges which focus more on teaching. This may or may not be bad, depending on your point of view, but it is not done on the larger college’s own merit– the government is funneling students to the larger colleges and away from the smaller ones. It’s not the proper role of government, and it certainly doesn’t help scientific study at those smaller schools to lose the best students due to government policy.

But science is good!

Some of you might say, But science is good! It should be funded even more than it is now! I absolutely, completely agree with you. The reason it’s not is because the government is involved. Every American has less money because they’re paying for the NIH and DARPA and NSF and all these agencies, which include a large amount of bureaucracy as any government agency will– in fact, it even calls itself a “large bureaucracy,” if that tells you anything. Therefore, if we took the amount of research that comes from $1 billion of funding from the NIH and gave it to the private sector, we would have 20% more research. We wouldn’t lose all that extra to bureaucracy. No one can apply for NIH funding if they want to avoid Kafka-like red tape. At this point in time, scientists feel they need the NIH, but the NIH doesn’t need scientists, and it shows in the grant application and approval process. These are typical government agencies we’re dealing with. Some people even think they cause the problems scientists are trying to solve.

Private organizations can be more efficient and innovative.

Let’s look at some numbers. The NIH has an annual budget of at least $28 billion; the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced an initiative in which they would give 10 $20 million grants to deserving applicants who wished to try innovative solutions for tackling some of the world’s most pressing health problems. The program is widely considered to have achieved success just with these relatively small grants– because they were efficiently targeted, goals were set and in many cases achieved, and accountability was built in. Bill Gates is a businessman if there ever was one, and he’s not going to just throw his money around and not demand results from it. He’s also going to recognize and reward innovation when he sees it. Does the NIH have similar mechanisms built in? Has the NIH ever achieved a similar goal with such a relatively small amount of money, $200 million? Does the NIH reward innovation, or does it reward expected results?

The United States isn’t even conducting its “trendy” research in an efficient way. It conducts a third of the world’s cancer research, but only has the fifth-best results. It’s funding a lot of things, but they’re not the right things.

Again, you just can’t trust the government with this stuff.

Scientists have signed a petition alleging that the Bush administration is:

“all too willing to deny scientific truths, disrupt scientific investigations, block scientific progress, undermine scientific education, and sacrifice the very integrity of the scientific process itself — all in the pursuit of implementing their particular political agenda. And today this dominant political agenda is profoundly allied and intertwined with an extremist (and extremely anti-science) ideological agenda put forward by powerful fundamentalist religious forces commonly known as the Religious Right. These fundamentalists now have extensive influence and representatives in major institutions of the U.S. government, including Congress and the White House.”

They are arguing my point for me. In the type of political system we have, people can elect whoever they want to office. More often than not, those people will be ignorant of science or want to exploit it for their own political agendas. The administration in question had the ability to do all this to science because we gave them the power to do so. If we entrust the power to decide where science goes and what is done in science next into the hands of these government officials despite knowing what can and will happen, we have only ourselves to blame.

In my follow-up post, I discuss what the alternatives to government-provided science are.

Libertarian science, science funding, science regulation, science and government, government influence on science, evil nanotechnology, nanotechnology, Eric Drexler, James Hansen, Republicans science, Democrats science

I found this interesting in a few ways. Many people think that the only entity which should be authorized to license or test anyone is the government. This is simply not true. CITA is an independent, nonprofit agency with the sole purpose of serving as an objective third party with knowledgeable dentists on staff who can grade the students’ work and decide if it meets licensing requirements. This is the essence of privatization, as long as the government contracts hiring this company are sent out for bids and don’t overpay CITA. The group started with only Mississippi and North Carolina and has now expanded to a number of states, along with Puerto Rico.

Many people say, How can you trust a private corporation that is not the government to provide these important services? The answer is simple: free market capitalism. If the agency or company doesn’t provide good service and exactly what it is supposed to for the states, the state will turn to a different provider, which will have to in turn show that it is better than the preceding agency in order to keep the state’s business. If the nonprofit or corporation doesn’t provide good results, they won’t be able to continue because they won’t have clients.

Why not take it a step further and allow a nonprofit organization, made of dentists as CITA is, to decide what is necessary for someone to be a licensed dentist and get rid of state laws regarding occupational licensing altogether?

If the nonprofits start taking capitalism to heart and turning a profit at the same time, that’s all the better for everyone.

Tags: Occupational licensing, dental boards, state exams, state licensing laws, licensing laws libertarian

The answer lies in the Federal Reserve, our privately owned and mostly privately operated central bank. When it was created by Congress in 1913, $1 was worth… $1. Now, that $1 is worth four cents, due to the inflation that the Federal Reserve stimulates in our economy. The Fed has been working especially overtime since the 1970s, when we went completely off the gold standard and the Fed could print up as much money as it wanted to.

Here’s a display of how the Federal Reserve works, in Legos…

Tags: Federal Reserve, inflation, inflation since 1970s, Ye Olde Waffle Shop Chapel Hill, Federal Reserve inflation, Ron Paul Federal Reserve

The study was conducted by nonprofit leaders regarding organizations located in the Washington DC area– local, national and international. The source is biased, sure, but I’d love to see someone dispute its basic premise: nonprofits can deliver services that government currently does (editorial note: in a more efficient way), through private donations, while allowing people to become “self-sufficient” in the long-term.

I’d love to see a government program that has those same effects, but does the government even try to claim that about itself? I suspect any government program that is both efficient with taxpayer dollars and eventually leads to self-sufficiency is few and far between, if a single one exists at all.

Why can’t we expand this nonprofit success by using some of these nonprofit organizations for delivering some of the “services” that Americans have come to rely on their government for and pay with everyone’s taxpayer dollars? I’d take the Red Cross over FEMA any day, as well as the Nature Conservancy over the EPA. What about you?

Tags: private vs. public, privatization, nonprofits, nonprofit study, nonprofits government