Posted on 01/04/2002 5:34:10 AM PST by tberry
This assumes that rights are granted by the government. Are you sure you're not confusing rights with privileges or entitlements?
No, my "friend," I am an inventor with a VERY high hit rate.
I happened to have learned this first hand, working to raise venture capital for start-up biotech firms.
No. You have learned that your biotech business is so risky that you have to go to the government to get the dough. Another way of saying that is that the net present value of your biotech ideas does not return as much as other uses of capital. That destroys the capital that would otherwise reduce the apparent cost of that risk.
Then you flatter yourself with the idea that you are some kind of visionary, thus:
Private business cannot fund a great deal of basic research because such lacks any immediate profit potential.
Not "can’t," WON’T. So you go to a politician and tell him a load about future high-paying jobs (screw those little people). That politician has the power to get you that investment money at gunpoint, and you and your buddies don't have to foot the risk. What a stud you are! Let's examine that little fallacy with a precedent or two.
Let's see try to understand how airplanes fly into skyscrapers. Let me explain it for you. Airports are expensive. So governments paid for that risk. They hired the security companies who don't own the cost of the risk of a security breach. That means expensive and ineffective airport security. The FAA sets the rules for cockpit security and everything is harmonized because the airlines lobbied the government for lax security provisions. That means that the insurance company doesn't raise premiums rendering the cost of the risk of removing secure cockpit doors and disarming pilots unacceptable. As a result air travel is very cheap, but then, it's in part because the public has unwittingly adsorbed that risk...
Boom.
The we the taxpayers PAY $15 billion dollars to the airline executives who lobbied for that public assumption of risk.
What might have happened instead? Well if air travel had born its total cost, then substitutes for air travel would have received more investments. Had telecommunications been unregulated we might have seen more investment in boradband at an earlier date. That would have meant that the market would have been able to support more telecommuting (less wasted oil and capital for cars) and returns on the Internet would have been higher. Yes. Regulation is in part responsible for the dot com bust.
You want your biotech risks subsidized by taxpayers. I just can't wait for a RoundUp Ready weed to escape! Is Monsanto going to pay for mitigating that risk? As far as I am concerned you can tell Alex Zaffaroni, Carl Gerazzi, and John Diekman that they can pay for it on their own nickel.
However, once the basic work is done, knowledge starts to migrate toward more potentially profitable applications and private investment in research becomes feasible.
As if I didn’t understand pooled risk. Listen, you corporate fascist welfare queen, next time you come to the taxpayers asking for their hard-earned money to fund your good ideas you can just go back to the lab. I want that privatized too. That's right. No more public universities. The cost of those little claques of communists has long outlived their usefulness. The risks that they pose to our freedom aren't worth their paychecks. The damage being done to the environment by government-subsidized communist earth worshippers is staggering.
The most interesting business model in this area is http://www.doteduventures.com/about_us.html
Interesting to you.
The professors in this venture fund select areas of likely useful basic reasearch, coordinate the grants necessary to fund the basic research, and then use their own funds to make venture capital investments in the potentially profitable results.
Public subsidies for fat cats.
A major problem with our government has long been excessive, often wasteful, spending and excessive taxation to fund it. Federal employees, as a group are more likely than not to be supportive of large government expenditure as they are likely to see it as in their interest and any curtailment thereof as potentially threatening to them. They will vote accordingly. As I said in my post above, the original setup in which District of Columbia did not vote was probably at least in part due to such considerations.
Why were the democrats so adamant to federalize airport security workers? It will swell the federal unions and increase the unions political contributions which go to the democrats. A corrective would be "paycheck protection" which would allow workers to refuse to have deductions from their paycheck for political contributions; but that isn't going to happen.
I understand that you, as a federal employee, would feel that it would be unfair for you to be disenfranchized because you are such. Well, on the other hand, if federal employees vote, all taxpayers can be expected to pay more taxes than if they don't.
I am not at all assuming that all federal employees vote democratic, only that a majority probably do - people tend to vote their pocketbook. You can characterize denying the vote to federal employees as a "penalty" if you like, but the founding fathers, in their wisdom, saw fit to do so, so I hardly think that it would be unconstitutional.
The government regularly establishes measures which hurt some but justifies them as being beneficial to the majority, this is just another such case. Why should the majority of Americans pay higher taxes so that federal employees can have the vote.
The whole point of my suggestion to disenfranchise federal employees is that it would help, and may even be necessary, to cut government bloat. If that disenfranchisement would make it harder for the government to hire (which I doubt, the security of federal employment should more than outway the largely illusory benefit of the franchise) then that would be an added benefit.
A federal employee fired? You must be joking.
Just don't want to go there, eh? Pragmatic, indeed.
" It was Mark Twain who pointed out: "It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress." Reiterating that sentiment much later, Twain offered: "It is the foreign element that commits our crimes. There is no native criminal class except Congress."
And the facts and figures continually pour in. Bill O’Reilly, in his latest book, continues to lament the disappearance of millions and billions of taxpayer-earned dollars squandered by our criminal ruling class in Washington in the form of Department of Education funds and other forms of waste and corruption. He laments the shoddy bookkeeping by government agencies. What bookkeeping? As a former government finance officer, I can personally testify to the dismal lack of responsible accounting and recordkeeping methods. And the congressional watchdog, the General Accounting Office, as well as its Comptroller General, are in full but little publicized agreement!"
The key advantage to the private sector is the accountability of the bottom line and competitive forces. But if you think that business can manage large organizations any better than government, then you've never been in a committee hearing at G.M. As bad as public solutions are, there are as many successes. Our government has proven itself more efficient than even your best run business in many ways. I'll bet if you try real, real hard, you can think of an instance or two. You'll be surprised.
One of your solutions is to rid ourselves of public universities. The college I attended is private, and it employs a higher percentage of socialists than State U. And it's just as innefficient.
Here's a successful socialized industry for ya: road building. The private sector tried it and failed. W.K. Vanderbilt had to piece together his L.I. Parkway (1908-1930s) like a quilt around lands he could not obtain passage rights or simply purchase (farmers quickly learned the market principle of supply and demand, especially when holding a last connector slice of land). NY commissioner Moses simply paved a straight path with the force of eminent domain and taxation, and put Vanderbilt out of business. Although traffic jams could be avoided on the Vanderbilt parkway by jacking up the price, the Hamptons are more conveniently reached on the public highway, even by people who could afford Vanderbilt's tolls.
Maybe all business needs is eminent domain, and it would build and run better highways? Sure didn't work with the railroads. Put it this way: you wouldn't want to have been a mid-western farmer in the 1870s. Or a Standard Oil competitor in 1900. The railroads basically begged government to regulate their problems away (read Kolko; also, Woodrow Wilson proved that both solutions could be equally stupid...).
I'm amused by the way the progressives turned to big business to solve the world's problems, while at the same time business turned to governemt to solve its problems. The progressive movement that orginally turned on fighting the "trusts" ended up trying to join them. If the trusts and the progressives had had their way, the business-government partnership would have gone the way of German national socialism. Nice. The thinking that got them into these idiot proposals was that "business efficiencies" would overcome all problems. If most of our "public" functions were handled by business, I'd bet we'd have ended up in a socialized system a lot quicker than the extent to which we are now (not much: no public ownership of industry; but that's an argument on another thread here: Is America a Socialist Country? ) Going back to the railroads shows us how ugly a mix it is when public/private interests collide.
I look upon it all as impurities: there is no total solution, and each creates its own problems. Thus I would go back to tberry's reply #45 and review which system would better serve the public good, public or private.
The "myth" is not that there is no "limited" government, but that there would be anything "limited" that would replace it.
While you're bitching about that statement, let me help: Yes, government is too big. Business couldn't do it any better, and at least I can vote for the CEO. Here's an example: ever try to cash a check at a bank in which you don't have an account? You have to give your fingerprint. How would we all feel about that if government required a fingerprint for... a library card, a drivers license (apparantly some States do???). And do you think that business wouldn't ask for more power than government is able to weild to accomplish the same things? Foggetaboutit.
The solution is to fight it out at each instance. Dept. of Education: gone. State Hwy Dept: fine by me. Condemnation of the whole is intellectual gaming.
It is true that currently a student with limited resources who wants quality higher learning most likely will have to attend a public institution. Tuition at private institutions has inflated at about 5 times the average inflation rate, as bad as health care. One university that I know of charged $800 a year in 1957 and $24,000 in 2000. Demand for higher "education" (the demand for learning isrelatively low) is is only a little less "inelastic," as the economists say, than that for health care. Also, in both cases the nature of the services provided has changed in ways that make it more expensive. But also, Charles Murray's principle, quoted in my post #42 above, is in operation here. The availability of government grants and low interest loans has been a factor in driving tuition costs up, just as medicaid and medicare have helped to drive up health-care costs. The driving up of costs has probably had a negative effect on the quality of instruction, as witnessed, in particular, at the ivy league schools. When students are paying so much, professors can hardly bring themselves to gave them anything but an A or a B, much less to actually fail them.
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