The previous history of humanity isn't a standard that I think we should aspire to. It means no democracy, short lives, widespread brutality, open discriminatio

The previous history of humanity isn't a standard that I think we should aspire to. It means no democracy, short lives, widespread brutality, open discrimination against most people, and not much investment in or success in the sciences. It looks like you may be conflating several separate issues here. My point is that science seemed to work fine in, say, the period 1550–1950 without the NSF, NIH, etc., and it's not necessarily a disaster if we return to that model. We don't, at the same time, have to shorten lives, increase brutality, etc. (Democracy is a mixed bag at best, though; for example, in 1783 France was a troubled but basically functional absolute monarchy, and by 1793 it was a universal suffrage democracy that guillotined tens of thousands in the streets of Paris and bound books in leather made from human skin. [1]) [grant writing is] tedious, time-consuming, but apolitical and based on merit. Getting federal research grants is apolitical only if your subject is apolitical, and the list of apolitical scientific subjects gets shorter every year. There are whole fields of inquiry—exploring heritable cognitive differences (if any) as a function of ancestry, for example—that are essentially verboten, while others (e.g., stem-cell research and climate science) are impossible to separate from politics. Moreover, even apolitical fields are notoriously subject to the whims of (democratically elected) Congress. [1]: http://bit.ly/FrRevHL http://bit.ly/FrRevHL