3 ms·
That's the problem. They can't answer that question and neither can the market. The market is great at assigning value to things based on scarcity and demand,
by nananonymous 10y ago
That's the problem. They can't answer that question and neither can the market. The market is great at assigning value to things based on scarcity and demand, but there will never be scarcity of the Navier-Stokes equations because they can just be copied and shared so the market is useless for saying what they're worth.
And before a discovery is made literally nobody knows how it might change the world. I somehow doubt a thousand investors could have better predicted the future value of the transistor any better than the handful of electrical engineers working on that frontier.
- jamesdwilson 10y agogood answer. thank you for taking me on. does it justify theft though?
- nananonymous 10y agoI have a hard time seeing taxation as always theft. In a democratic society the public either is or was part of the decision on whether or not to fund things like the LHC. If society agrees to pay for it then by definition there's no coercion. I think the LHC has over a dozen participating countries, each of which volunteered to be part of it. Ideally there should be checks and balances making sure a project of this scale is free from corruption.
- jamesdwilson 10y agoif tax isn't theft, then the free market will decide to do the same thing..
- contravariant 10y agoIt did.
- fauigerzigerk 10y agoNeither theft nor markets exist without property rights. And to have property rights you need a legal system, you need democratic institutions, law makers, an executive branch that enforces your legal rights, etc. That costs money. It requires the work and agreement of others. You are not entitled to that for free and without entering into any sort of negotiation that involves give and take. Your demand for protection against that thing you call "theft" is essentially a demand for the existence of a system of government, and that requires taxes. Therefore the claim that taxes are theft contradicts itself.
- braymundo 10y agoThis should be interesting for the "tax is theft" crowd: http://lesswrong.com/lw/e95/the_noncentral_fallacy_the_worst_argument_in_the/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/e95/the_noncentral_fallacy_the_worst...
- dwaltrip 10y agoYour comments would be more positively received if you acknowledged the minority position your views represent, and take that into consideration when trying to make points to others. Many people support large amounts of free market activity and decentralized economic agency, but most people believe that only relying on this model of human organization will bring significant harm to society. Very few people consider the idea of "taxation is theft" to be even remotely reasonable. Thus there is a fairly large gap for you to bridge when trying to make points that rely on such principles.
- jamesdwilson 10y agobut companies such as cocacola, and well, many many others, are researching things all the time for discoveries that benefit their company.
- nananonymous 10y agoThat's great for solving known problems, like maybe Coke could estimate that reducing turbulence in their pipes in Warehouse ABC would save them a half million dollars a year. Then they can set aside money, maybe insure the project against failure, the insurance company has some idea what to charge them for such a policy, and so on. But when Einstein was working on Relativity nobody could have foreseen what it would make possible. In that case the discovery was made and then eventually the business sector found a way to sell it, decades afterwards. Today we know what GPS makes possible so we know what it's worth, but in 1905 there was basically no market value for it.
- jamesdwilson 10y agogood points, thank you
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]