[547] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
Re: "Watch me pull laissez-faire capitalism out of this
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Alex Coventry)
Sat May 5 14:49:50 2001
To: "Sourav K. Mandal" <Sourav.Mandal@ikaran.com>
Cc: mit-talk@MIT.EDU
From: Alex Coventry <alex_c@MIT.EDU>
Date: 05 May 2001 14:49:20 -0400
In-Reply-To: "Sourav K. Mandal"'s message of "Sat, 05 May 2001 12:33:48 -0400"
Message-ID: <etdy9sb637z.fsf@pickled-herring.mit.edu>
> True, collective action requires that everyone involved buy into it
> and act of their own free will; but, would any other way be morally
> tolerable? [snip] Forcing anyone to join particular endeavours is
> deplorable.
Perhaps. It's the most effective way to achieve certain goals and has
been crucial to US success, though. *shrug*
> there are plenty of dollars coming from private companies who don't
> have the size to run their own basic research labs, like old-time Bell
> and IBM. Futhermore, most private universities established after
> American independence obtained their initial endowments from wealthy
> individuals.
If you think MIT can fund its current activities from such support, why
don't you present a budget detailing how?
> If the government were to get its mitts out of private pocketbooks,
> research dollars might be more rationally allocated, driven by
> economic rather than largely socio-political considerations
So you think that, say, the Human Genome Project was irrational? It's
true they adopted a more efficient method to keep time with Celera, but
it's hard to see how so much valuable data would have ended up in the
public domain had the job been left to Celera alone.
I'm also very dubious that a modern pharmaceuticals company would have
duplicated Watson and Crick's fundamental results had they not been
funded by Cambridge University. Apparently, one of them got funding
from the National Foundation For Infantile Paralysis, which was
primarily government funded, as far as I can tell, though some funding
came from the March of Dimes (Presumably there's somewhere to look this
up...) but they were definitely using government money for the most
part. And no one could have even conceived of Celera's business plan
before the structure of DNA was known. :)
> However, even if it were, it should have no bearing on the
> determination of what is _ethical_. Just as sociology should not sway
> principle when it comes to civil liberties, economics should not
> affect matters of economic liberty.
Unfortunately, ethical questions are not that simple. If ethically
unacceptable consequences of an intrinsically economic or sociological
nature could be expected to arise from adherence to a given ethical
principle, then that principle needs to be compromised to an extent. I
don't like paying taxes which fund government programs I have no control
over, either, but I doubt I'd want to live in any jurisdiction where I
could safely evade that responsibility. If you can name some wealthy,
developed, stable regions of the world where it's safe and easy to evade
taxes, I'd be very interested. :)
Alex.
