[557] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
Re: "Watch me pull laissez-faire capitalism out of this
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Alex Coventry)
Sun May 6 12:54:52 2001
To: "Sourav K. Mandal" <Sourav.Mandal@ikaran.com>
Cc: mit-talk@MIT.EDU
From: Alex Coventry <alex_c@MIT.EDU>
Date: 06 May 2001 12:54:25 -0400
In-Reply-To: "Sourav K. Mandal"'s message of "Sat, 05 May 2001 18:38:41 -0400"
Message-ID: <etdlmoa2zb2.fsf@pickled-herring.mit.edu>
> In what way? The Vietnam War, which I *think* was the first conflict
> to use the draft extensively, was hardly an unmitigated success.
Yes, there have been deplorable, disastrous instances of forcing people
to contribute to US efforts. It's silly to tar other wildly successful
and less intrusive forced group contributions like taxation with the
same brush, though.
[Re the source of MIT funding]
> However, the fed still accounts for some 70% of research, with 20%
> coming from industry. There are a couple theories of what's going on:
[snip]
[anticipation and rebuttal of explanations for the large govt
contributions to research]
> There is a strong tradition of fine basic research in private
> industry. In physics, seminal work solid state physics was done at
> Bell Labs, and currently firms like IBM and TI are doing fundamental
> research for areas such as nanotech. If size is the only
> consideration, then there are plenty of companies big enough.
Obviously, size is not the only consideration, the interests of the
organization critically shape the character of the research being done.
Bell Labs and IBM are remarkable special cases but the contributions
researchers at those companies have made to their fields are a drop in
the bucket compared to the progress made in academia. I have worked
with Peter Shor (inventor of the quantum computational factoring
algorithm) at ATT Research NJ. The "basic research" division there is
quite small, less than 20 people, I would estimate. I talked to Peter
about what ATT gets out of employing him to do work that is basically
useless to them. His reply was more modest, but amounted to "I'm a
smart guy, and problems come up every so often in their real work that I
can help them with." I think it's very unlikely that every academic
could find work in a corporation on those terms. Moreover, his work in
quantum computation depends crucially on discoveries made in academia.
> They better have, given how much they collect in corporate taxes!
> (About $180 billion for FY 1999 alone, according to the back of my
> 1040 Telefile form.)
That seems a tiny return, considering the wealth that is tied up in US
corporations. I would be astonished if US corporations did not derive
considerably more than $180 billion dollars benefit per year from public
facilities maintained and/or developed with the support of the federal
government.
[the case of the HGP.]
> I would not have supported a _patent_ by Celera on that data, only a
> copyright; the genome itself is prior art, after all.
I happen to work in something closely related to Celera's interests. I
believe can't sign their licence agreement to use their data as I would
risk severely limiting my options if I decide to pursue a career in
bioinformatics after I graduate. Their licence agreement is based on
copyright, by the way.
> With the latter, any org (perhaps, a non-profit) that was not happy
> with Celera's licensing scheme could have made their own investment in
> mining the genome data. On average, this kind of private industry
> solution is more efficient than government intervention and
> domination; it is certainly more ethical.
I'll deal with the ethical issue a little further down. I'm not
convinced by your bald assertion that a private organizations are
intrinsically more efficient than public ones. For one thing, given the
massive startup costs needed to finance the sequencing of the genome in
a timely fashion, it's unclear that the genome would have sequenced by a
non-profit organization at all. I think you need to expand your
argument a little, here.
> are you implying that government funding is somehow intrinsically
> superior than private funding? Given how central DNA is to biology,
> it seems unlikely that a private lab wouldn't have stumbled upon it
> eventually.
You don't stumble on something like the structure of DNA. Determining
it involved a huge amount of work, with little promise of immediate
financial reward. No company in its right mind would fund such a thing.
So yes, government funding is important to scientific progress, because
it makes such basic research possible. You can see exactly the same
forces at work in the ATT example I mentioned above.
[ethical issues]
> In that case, the ethical principle in question would be wrong, since
> a body of ethics is singular and universal by definition. You are
> saying that if an inconsistency is exposed, the ethical principle
> needs to be toned down; I would say it would have to be scrapped
> altogether.
If you haven't been forced to compromise between ethical principles
directing you to behave in contradictory ways, you've led a charmed
life, Sourav. To quote Sisela Bok quoting Epicurus, "Ethics deals with
things to be sought and things to be avoided, with ways of life and with
the Telos" ("Telos" is the chief good, the aim, or the end of life.)
Life is too complex to be amenable to a simple set of rules about how to
behave, all you can do is choose a set of values for yourself, and try
to favour those values in deciding how to behave. Sometimes the values
you've chosen contradict each other and in those cases, intelligent
people seek compromise.
In a response to Cannady you wrote
> Ethics don't really apply in "lifeboat" situations, because the right
> to conscious life is presupposed in ethics. If there is ever a
> situation where one person's life becomes mutually exclusive with
> another, there is no basis for a consideration of ethics. So, I can
> neither fault nor support someone who decides to kill to preserve his
> or her own life.
> However, this is simply not the case in 99.999...% of real life, where
> each person has values which they can trade to mutual benefit.
from which I inferred that you may mean something different by ethics,
that you're actually referring to some sort of optimization of your
behaviour for the sake of social standing. Is that what you mean?
> If you think laissez-faire _necessarily_ leads to unethical actions,
> please describe how.
For starters, I think it would be tragic to scrap the elaborate social
structures that make the US the economic and cultural powerhouse it is
today just so that you can feel a little less oppressed by the IRS and
the ATF. I also think that there are forms of commercial exploitation
that a laissez-faire government would be ill-equipped to deal with.
sethf's excellent article "Libertarianism makes you stupid"
(http://www.spectacle.org/897/finkel.html) gives some good examples, but
I don't really have time to argue about that aspect, and the ethics of
laissez-faire economics are really secondary to the inefficiencies it's
likely to induce, to my mind.
[Tax laws in other countries]
I find your suggestions of countries where you can easily evade tax to
be frivolous. The three countries you mention that could plausibly be
said to be wealthy, stable and developed -- Hong Kong, Switzerland and
the US -- all have tax codes with teeth.
> The US, as you probably know, had no income tax prior to the civil
> war, and no stringently enforced income tax prior to WW I.
As it turns out, I was aware of that, but I'm actually from Australia,
and my knowledge of US history (mostly learnt in high school) is
correspondingly distorted. However, I'm not sure what your point in
raising these facts is. Our most detailed study of US history began
around the time of WW I, as the US began to exert a strong influence on
world affairs. It would be facile to conclude that this influence
sprung directly from effective taxation, but to my mind it does lend
support to the idea that a society with a well-organized goverment
capable of implementing significant projects is likely to be more
effective than one with minimal government coordination.
> Ideally, I myself would not mind paying a flat fee per annum to cover
> the services I use (or might use), namely national defense, federal
> law enforcement, the courts, legislature, etc. Of course, if I don't
> pay the government should not permit itself to attack me; simply, if a
> third party were to assault me, I would not rely on the government for
> protection.
Well, everyone'd do things differently if they were in charge. Such
assertions aren't very valuable unless you can show in detail how the
changes you recommend should work and what the advantages would be.
Your proposal sounds inherently unstable to me, because people who don't
share your objectivist values are going to accrete around the power you
would afford the government, and bend that power to other ends than you
have in mind.
Alex.
