Subsidizing science

Morally, it seems to me, subsidizing science by taxation is indefensible. Science (outside defense) has nothing to do with force, and therefore does not qualify as a response or prevention of force; taxation for science is therefore a morally reprehensible first use of force. Voters' approval does not make it any less forceful, for they do not say "I will pay even if you don't;" they authorize force (or the threat of force) to be used against all who are unwilling to pay the subsidy.

So much for morality, but would it be realistic and feasible to raise the funds for science, including basic research, without immediate profits, by voluntary means?

The answer is not obvious: the historical evidence ranges from meager to non-existent. The semiconductor revolution was ushered in by the transistor invented at Bell Labs, and other momentous discoveries were made at IBM, Boeing, and other non-governmental institutions. But they all get government con-tracts, defense-related or not; they all are closely tied to the government by regulations, tax policies and a thousand other bonds. (Whether this is a forcible, resented invasion or a wel-come and cozy relationship is another matter.)

If that is so with paper and pencil, how about a $5 billion supercollider? Could the funds be raised voluntarily?

With nothing else changed, probably not. Yet it is precisely because private enterprise is so closely regulated by bureaucrats that corporations spend hundreds of millions on snake oil con-sultants to train their employees in "social responsibility," and further hundreds of millions on lawyers to sue and countersue in the jungle of laws applying first force. The elimination of such waste alone would be a source of funds for basic research that would ultimately increase their profits.

If that is so with the millions, think of what they could do with the billions now paid in taxes to bureaucrats to finance, say, the armies of social workers who are maintaining poverty.

And not just bureaucrats. At the universities, more than half of each tax-subsidized research grant now goes for "overhead," meaning not just funds for administrators, but for the philo-sophers who teach that all truth is relative, for the political scien-tists who teach that technology is war, for the economists who teach that capitalism is wasteful and immoral, and for the social scientists who claim there is no such thing as unpolitical science. The system is financing its own destruction.

This sorry state is unlikely to be changed by education, which is firmly in the hands of the subsidized redistributors, nor by clever philosophers who preach to the converted, and least of all by electing new politicians to the old system. It will be changed by what has always been the most important factor of change: tech-nology. The digital computer may well bring about a radical transformation of society. We can already see the small and genuinely private software and electronics companies, often owned by a single inventor, working wonders; in a matter of decades, I venture to predict, they will be the death of IBM, Xerox, and the other unwieldy colossi who are ever more clearly displaying the symptoms of a deadly disease: the inability to dis-cern their own self-interest.

Like their predecessors, the fire tamers, the corn raisers, and the inventors of gun powder, printing press and steam engine, these small entrepreneurs, who are substituting computers for employees and contracts for payrolls, will be quite unaware of their revolution. Not needing to be subsidized, they may cause the redistributing parasites to die off, for it is difficult to coerce an individual producer who has no employees.

They may return science to its mission of a pure search for truth unfouled by politics. In a world where government coercion is limited to criminals and external aggressors, I believe science would bloom by voluntary support.

For people would not give to science and basic research; they would invest in it.