Topic: Useless intellectual work (Read 7944 times)

I agree, even if that was not really my point.  Motivation, initiative and will are highly important in any human activity, including scientific research.  Clearly intellectual energy would be much better used in a liberal manner.

The point is we don't know. They take the resources, stuff gets made/invented. Of course some of it is good and useful. But we have no idea what was sacrificed because it never came into existence because the resources were redirected.

With no cost comparison good decisions cannot be made. This is really just the socialist calculation problem.

We end up with different knowledge and technologies, probably.

Maybe there would be some kind of electro-mechanical internet precursor.

This is very much NOT my point.  Please read my initial post again.  Or maybe I should rewrite it.

What I call useless is the intellectual work which is dedicated not to actual research, but only in the determination of the smartest people.  Once those smart people are detetected, they are given high social status, without any real requirement for them to do any real actual scientific research.  This is a waste of good brain power, and it is a very wrong basis for society.

It is not a random search. Myriad factors conscious and unconscious, human and otherwise determine what is explored and how. When a small group redirects massive amounts of funds either to their own desired research or to research that merely sounds productive we end up with inferior and less knowledge than if people had the freedom to determine for themselves when and how their resources should be deployed.

"Useless" isn't quite the right word though. You can steal and put something to some use. But there is undoubtedly huge loss when the people who have the ability to create resources are stripped by force of their ability to allocate those resources where they think they will be most productive.

"Useless intellectual work" I don't believe in that.

Science is like a random-search. The more scientists you employ, the more discoveries they will make. But it's hardly a goal directed activity, because a big part of science is exploring. You can't predict in advance which scientist will stumble upon that big discovery that will change the future. So you need to employ a lot of bright people, even though a major part will not ever do a discovery that will make history, but will (if lucky) just produce some incremental advances.

A good example is the discovery of microwave, the military were not exactly looking for a way to heat meals. But one smart researcher accidentally discovered the effect (the chocolate he had in his pocket heated up for some strange reason), and deduced how it works.

That's how science works. And this makes it very hard to unify with the complete goal-directedness and competition of a free market.

(Another thing is that an advance in science might take ten, fifty or even hundreds of years to make it into an actual commercially feasible product. Example of these are advances in theoretical physics... they might allow for space travel, exponentially faster CPUs, at SOME point in the future)

A condominium is a voluntary contract. It only bounds those who voluntarily accept it.
There's nothing voluntary in the state.

I see it more like a maintenance fee for a condominium that happens to be a regional monopoly.

That's interesting, but not uncommon for children of wealthy origins to rebel against what their own family represents, and their actual family members.  It doesn't negate my statement.  I was being factious, as I have no knowledge of your background, but just because you may have rejected your family doesn't mean that there isn't a trust fund waiting for your return to the family fold.

To be clear, for the benefit of our resident trust fund baby who travels the world meeting poor people; taxation is by it's nature, the use or threat of force to compel someone to support a social structure that they would not do so otherwise.  This may be a neccessary evil, but it is still evil; so the ideal answer for society is to limit the government to a set few functions that can only be performed with the use of collective force.  Aid of the poor is not one of those functions, as there are other solutions that have been successful in the past.

It is ignorace of the nature of governments, that they are constructs that are developed (even in democratic societies) to manage and direct the "legitimate" use of violence, that is leading to the breakdown of civil society in Europe as well as the United States.  This is the only purpose of armies, courts and law enforcement anywhere in the world; the only difference between such a government in a modern Western democracy and a third world dictator is who gets to decide what is a legitimate use of that force.


As such, governments everywhere are notoriously bad at managing social support networks, (because it's it beyond their realm of expertise) while generally being quite effective at the functions of government wherein controlled violence is the primary objective, such as warfighting and border defenses.

I didn't say anything about the poor being lazy scroungers. That's YOUR words. I don't have anything against helping the poor and so on.

But, I am against stealing. Taxation is a form of stealing. It's wrong, period. Like I said, it doesn't matter if you tax the poor or the rich. Nobody deserve to have their property being stolen, no many how selfish you are or how rich or poor you are.

Free healthcare is not a free lunch.

Even so, taxing the rich is just as evil in taxing the poor.

Some rich people actually contribute to the economy, ya know?

+1

Yes, it is easy to come up with ways to spend money earned by others, then taken from them by force.

Yeah, as if taxing rich people was the solution for all problems in the world...

Then do it.  With YOUR money.  YOUR work.  Don't force people to do the same.

You can't make laws on assumptions like that.  You can't say :

"If we don't do this, then that will happen, and it would be not good."

It would be too easy.  This is almost similar to blackmailing.  It reminds me the banking system, crying for some money from the government : "If you don't give us 700 G$, it's gonna be the end of the world...".  Are we supposed to just believe it and comply ??  No way.

Your predictions about what would happen if we do or do not something, are no justification for taxation.   Therefore I won't even try to explain to you why I disagree about your belief in government being necessary for scientific progress.  It would be irrelevant.

On the contrary, I am not against academia, or dynamic innovative culture, or any of that stuff. What I am merely against is coercion.

I believe that we should fund academia, if such is a good thing in the first place, with money voluntary donated or paid from the people.

That's not the lesson that Bastiat taught. You're missing the point.
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Destroying windows mean that window maker benefit, but the shoemakers would have to spend it on replacing window rather than buying shoes. The lesson here is about the fact that "making work" doesn't mean increased productivity or greater wealth to society and individuals as a whole.

I don't get your point.

I didn't want to talk about any morality of money.  What I am saying is that nowadays brains are not used to produce wealth, but only to gain the right to enslave people (I'm exagerating a bit to make my point clearer).

In a extreme version of this, society would be divided in two parts :  people whom intellingence would have been detected during youth with IQ tests, and other "dumb" people.  The formers would have the right not to work in life.  They would just collect the fruit of the labor done by the latters.  This fruit of labour would be stolen via organized force.

Yep, exactly.