Bradley in DC
10-24-2007, 06:53 AM
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Thomas Friedman, the New York Times foreign-
affairs columnist, is beside himself because the
2005 federal budget contains a 2 percent, or
$105 million, cut for the National Science Foundation
(NSF). As W. S. Gilbert would say, “Oh, horror!”
This, Friedman predicted in his December 5, 2004,
column (“Fly Me to the Moon”), will condemn us
Americans to a bleak future indeed. In support he
enlists Shirley Ann Jackson, president of the
American Association for the Advancement of
Science. Not coincidentally, this organization is popu-
lated by the collectors of innumerable NSF grants. Not
everything a scientist says is objective.
Would it be too much to expect one of the country’s
most prominent journalists to do a little historical
digging? Friedman might have discovered substantial
scientific and medical projects undertaken and
successfully completed by privately funded interests.
As Aaron Steelman wrote in these pages over six
years ago, “[T]he private sector has been responsible for
some of mankind’s most important scientific
breakthroughs” (“The Free Market and Scientific
Research,” May 1998, www.fee.org/vnews.php?nid=
4017). Steelman went on to document his assertion with
cases such as the discovery of a smallpox vaccine, diph-
theria antitoxin, DNA, the genetic structure of viruses,
the practical application of penicillin, and more. Private
money, such as that provided by the Rockefeller
Foundation, made this heroic work possible.
If Friedman’s point is that fewer projects would be
funded, how does he know that too many aren’t being
funded now?
Folks like Friedman take it for granted that only the
government will undertake large-scale scientific ven-
tures. But where does the government get the money?
All government can do is take wealth from those who
produced it and give it to those who didn’t. The stock
answer is that private investors won’t finance “basic
research” because it’s not profitable in the short run.
What this really means is that politicians and bureau-
crats can be counted on to see the benefits of basic
research more objectively than entrepreneurs. I’d like
to see Friedman say that with a straight face.
As Public Choice economics teaches, we are far
safer in presuming that politicians and bureaucrats are
motivated by re-election and career enhancement
than by a desire to benefit people who must finance
government activities whether they like them or not.
Political officials are apt to look only at the immediate
benefits to highly visible and well-organized con-
stituencies, and not at the larger expense spread thinly
over the rest of society.
Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, earn profits
only by anticipating what people will find beneficial
and be willing to pay for. They must take costs
into account and have no taxpayers at their disposal.
(A real free market has no corporate welfare.)
Businessmen routinely project their plans years
ahead, without the prospect of an immediate payoff, if
an attractive return is anticipated later. Entrepreneurs
are capable of grasping that basic research will yield
valuable products. Could it be that Friedman fears that
his favorite projects won’t be chosen?
Many people believe that the billions Congress has
spent on the space program couldn’t possibly have
been put to better use. But how do they know that?
Government Should Fund Science?
It Just Ain’t So!
THE FREEMAN: Ideas on Liberty
Sheldon Richman (srichman@fee.org) is the editor of The Freeman.
BY SHELDON RICHMANPage 2
MARCH 2005
They have no idea what would have been discovered
and produced had the money been left in the private
sector, where consumer sovereignty, free exchange,
and the price system create the indispensable feedback
lacking in the political system.
Boards full of unaccountable political appointees
spending other people’s money do not inspire confi-
dence. Innovation and bureaucracy are words rarely
found together in affirmative sentences. Knowledge is
discovered through competition, but government cen-
tralization of research stifles competition. The
authorities are not interested in funding what they
regard as outside the mainstream. Moreover, govern-
ment financing reduces private financing and even
influences its direction. Political Correctness aggra-
vates the problem many times over. The last thing we
should want is the corrupting hand of bureaucracy
bending the scientific enterprise. (See Kent Jeffreys,
“Super Boondoggle: Time to Pull the Plug on the
Superconducting Super Collider,” Cato Briefing
Papers No. 16, May 26, 1992, www.cato.org/pub_dis-
play.php?pub_id=1457&print=Y&full=1.)
Pervasive Collectivism
What is most disturbing about Friedman’s article is
its pervasive collectivism. It is not enough for
him to argue that if the government doesn’t finance
scientific research, it won’t get done. No, he com-
mends massive government spending on science as a
way to enlist Americans in a common cause. He writes
that “a national science project . . . would be our gen-
eration’s moon shot: a crash science initiative for
alternative energy and conservation to make America
energy-independent in 10 years. Imagine if every
American kid, in every school, were galvanized around
such a vision.”
I could point out that the free market, if allowed to
work, has a built-in incentive to develop alternative
energies and conservation when they are needed: the
quest for profit. I could also ask what energy independ-
ence would mean in a globalized world, which
Friedman favors. But what I really need to ask is this:
why would we want to galvanize every American kid
around Friedman’s vision? Do we want young people to
look to a central authority for their mission in life?
He writes further that such a project “would also
create a magnet to inspire young people to contribute
to . . . America’s future by becoming scientists, engi-
neers and mathematicians.”
Is Friedman not aware that when people pursue
income and professional satisfaction they are led
as if by an invisible hand to “contribute to America’s
future,” if by that we mean the well-being of
Americans (and others, of course)? Many of them
will become scientists, engineers, and mathematicians
not because the government has herded them in that
direction, but rather because they love the work and
like the compensation. If the problem is science and
math education, then the solution has been available
all along: separation of school and state.
Friedman calls on President Bush to “Summon . . .
all our energies and skills to produce a 21st-century
fuel.” All our energies and skills? What does he have in
mind for those who wish to work or invest in other
areas of human need?
Of course, he has the obligatory quotation from
President Kennedy, one of the great champions of
national goal-setting: “We choose to go to the moon in
this decade . . . because that goal will serve to organize
and measure the best of our energies and skills.”
Friedman commends this attitude to President Bush,
but after SpaceShipOne, the successfully launched,
privately financed spacecraft, invoking the centralized
and obscenely wasteful space program that Kennedy
inspired sounds ignorant to say the least.
At any rate, why would we want government to
organize our energies and skills? America is
nothing if not a monument to the organizational
prowess of the liberal market order. Look around and
you’ll see that there’s no order like unplanned
order. No government has ever achieved any-
thing like what free people have achieved. And
unlike government, which does its organizing by
threatening violence against the innocent, the free
market achieves its wonders through consent, con-
tract, and incentive.
IT JUST AIN’T SO!: Government Should Fund Science?
G o o g l e automatically generates html versions of documents as we crawl the web.
To link to or bookmark this page, use the following url: http://www.google.com/custom?q=cache:CtJvlIhwffsJ:www.fee.org/pdf/the-freeman/richman0305.pdf+political+science&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=17&gl=us
Thomas Friedman, the New York Times foreign-
affairs columnist, is beside himself because the
2005 federal budget contains a 2 percent, or
$105 million, cut for the National Science Foundation
(NSF). As W. S. Gilbert would say, “Oh, horror!”
This, Friedman predicted in his December 5, 2004,
column (“Fly Me to the Moon”), will condemn us
Americans to a bleak future indeed. In support he
enlists Shirley Ann Jackson, president of the
American Association for the Advancement of
Science. Not coincidentally, this organization is popu-
lated by the collectors of innumerable NSF grants. Not
everything a scientist says is objective.
Would it be too much to expect one of the country’s
most prominent journalists to do a little historical
digging? Friedman might have discovered substantial
scientific and medical projects undertaken and
successfully completed by privately funded interests.
As Aaron Steelman wrote in these pages over six
years ago, “[T]he private sector has been responsible for
some of mankind’s most important scientific
breakthroughs” (“The Free Market and Scientific
Research,” May 1998, www.fee.org/vnews.php?nid=
4017). Steelman went on to document his assertion with
cases such as the discovery of a smallpox vaccine, diph-
theria antitoxin, DNA, the genetic structure of viruses,
the practical application of penicillin, and more. Private
money, such as that provided by the Rockefeller
Foundation, made this heroic work possible.
If Friedman’s point is that fewer projects would be
funded, how does he know that too many aren’t being
funded now?
Folks like Friedman take it for granted that only the
government will undertake large-scale scientific ven-
tures. But where does the government get the money?
All government can do is take wealth from those who
produced it and give it to those who didn’t. The stock
answer is that private investors won’t finance “basic
research” because it’s not profitable in the short run.
What this really means is that politicians and bureau-
crats can be counted on to see the benefits of basic
research more objectively than entrepreneurs. I’d like
to see Friedman say that with a straight face.
As Public Choice economics teaches, we are far
safer in presuming that politicians and bureaucrats are
motivated by re-election and career enhancement
than by a desire to benefit people who must finance
government activities whether they like them or not.
Political officials are apt to look only at the immediate
benefits to highly visible and well-organized con-
stituencies, and not at the larger expense spread thinly
over the rest of society.
Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, earn profits
only by anticipating what people will find beneficial
and be willing to pay for. They must take costs
into account and have no taxpayers at their disposal.
(A real free market has no corporate welfare.)
Businessmen routinely project their plans years
ahead, without the prospect of an immediate payoff, if
an attractive return is anticipated later. Entrepreneurs
are capable of grasping that basic research will yield
valuable products. Could it be that Friedman fears that
his favorite projects won’t be chosen?
Many people believe that the billions Congress has
spent on the space program couldn’t possibly have
been put to better use. But how do they know that?
Government Should Fund Science?
It Just Ain’t So!
THE FREEMAN: Ideas on Liberty
Sheldon Richman (srichman@fee.org) is the editor of The Freeman.
BY SHELDON RICHMANPage 2
MARCH 2005
They have no idea what would have been discovered
and produced had the money been left in the private
sector, where consumer sovereignty, free exchange,
and the price system create the indispensable feedback
lacking in the political system.
Boards full of unaccountable political appointees
spending other people’s money do not inspire confi-
dence. Innovation and bureaucracy are words rarely
found together in affirmative sentences. Knowledge is
discovered through competition, but government cen-
tralization of research stifles competition. The
authorities are not interested in funding what they
regard as outside the mainstream. Moreover, govern-
ment financing reduces private financing and even
influences its direction. Political Correctness aggra-
vates the problem many times over. The last thing we
should want is the corrupting hand of bureaucracy
bending the scientific enterprise. (See Kent Jeffreys,
“Super Boondoggle: Time to Pull the Plug on the
Superconducting Super Collider,” Cato Briefing
Papers No. 16, May 26, 1992, www.cato.org/pub_dis-
play.php?pub_id=1457&print=Y&full=1.)
Pervasive Collectivism
What is most disturbing about Friedman’s article is
its pervasive collectivism. It is not enough for
him to argue that if the government doesn’t finance
scientific research, it won’t get done. No, he com-
mends massive government spending on science as a
way to enlist Americans in a common cause. He writes
that “a national science project . . . would be our gen-
eration’s moon shot: a crash science initiative for
alternative energy and conservation to make America
energy-independent in 10 years. Imagine if every
American kid, in every school, were galvanized around
such a vision.”
I could point out that the free market, if allowed to
work, has a built-in incentive to develop alternative
energies and conservation when they are needed: the
quest for profit. I could also ask what energy independ-
ence would mean in a globalized world, which
Friedman favors. But what I really need to ask is this:
why would we want to galvanize every American kid
around Friedman’s vision? Do we want young people to
look to a central authority for their mission in life?
He writes further that such a project “would also
create a magnet to inspire young people to contribute
to . . . America’s future by becoming scientists, engi-
neers and mathematicians.”
Is Friedman not aware that when people pursue
income and professional satisfaction they are led
as if by an invisible hand to “contribute to America’s
future,” if by that we mean the well-being of
Americans (and others, of course)? Many of them
will become scientists, engineers, and mathematicians
not because the government has herded them in that
direction, but rather because they love the work and
like the compensation. If the problem is science and
math education, then the solution has been available
all along: separation of school and state.
Friedman calls on President Bush to “Summon . . .
all our energies and skills to produce a 21st-century
fuel.” All our energies and skills? What does he have in
mind for those who wish to work or invest in other
areas of human need?
Of course, he has the obligatory quotation from
President Kennedy, one of the great champions of
national goal-setting: “We choose to go to the moon in
this decade . . . because that goal will serve to organize
and measure the best of our energies and skills.”
Friedman commends this attitude to President Bush,
but after SpaceShipOne, the successfully launched,
privately financed spacecraft, invoking the centralized
and obscenely wasteful space program that Kennedy
inspired sounds ignorant to say the least.
At any rate, why would we want government to
organize our energies and skills? America is
nothing if not a monument to the organizational
prowess of the liberal market order. Look around and
you’ll see that there’s no order like unplanned
order. No government has ever achieved any-
thing like what free people have achieved. And
unlike government, which does its organizing by
threatening violence against the innocent, the free
market achieves its wonders through consent, con-
tract, and incentive.
IT JUST AIN’T SO!: Government Should Fund Science?