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Right. But unlike the military, there isn't actually a need for Congress to fund any science. Let it all be done by the private sector publicizing their breakthroughs as patents and citizen-scientists who want to spend their own time and effort and money doing research. Burn academia to the ground.
Who is funding fundamental research into topics like quantum mechanics that don't yield an immediate benefit but is still highly useful for society? The private sector probably wouldn't fund this research because the benefits accrue to a lot of competitors as well. Citizen-scientists can't fund it.
Is it? Honest question.
I'm only slightly embarrassed to admit that I based my opinion on this ChatGPT answer:
Okay...but all that I read here is "This stuff already worked before the current iteration of quantum theories, now we just understand it better" and not "novel quantum theories improved our ability to do this stuff". I'm not saying that's how it is, but that's all I gather from this chatbot response.
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Sure there is.
That’s like saying there isn’t actually a need to teach your kids to read. The free market will encourage them, right?
If you want your kids to have the best chance of success, you’d better provide them support and direction. If you want your fellow citizens to do useful research instead of going into paperclip advertising, maybe you’re going to have to coordinate it.
A separate question: why do we need Congress to handle the military? Why can’t we get equivalent quality defenses via crowdsourcing? Because it’s a distributed benefit, it has to have a coordinated cost. Education and research is the same way.
More like saying there is no need for the government to teach your kids to read. The free market will encourage people to teach their kids to read. Which is true. When I was a kid in Peru, there were government schools, but they were seen as the last resort of the poor; anybody who could afford it sent their kids to a private school. Which, admittedly, was much cheaper since all anyone needed to set up a private school was a spare garage and enough money to hire a teacher, but that's just another point in favor of the free market.
I'm not seeing the "benefits", is my thing. Like, let's leave aside the nonsense where grifters get paid to do research on hating white males (not because it doesn't happen, but because it is too easy a target) and focus on the strongest arguments for government-funded public research; things like NASA and the LHC that are discovering real scientific data that it is impossible a private non-government actor would have done.
How does New Horizons probe improve my life? How does finding the Higgs boson? How does developing the correct theory of quantum gravity? Why is the government stealing money from me to pay people to do these things?
The beauty of market-driven research is that it only happens when somebody with money has a positive expected rate of return, which means convincing other people with money to pay for the results, which means that the research is expected to make people's lives better in some way.
Government grants have no such fundamental tether to reality.
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While some kids will teach themselves to learn to read, the most critical times to develop are when they are so young they arent reasonably given all sorts of freedoms. So parents need to be somewhat dictatorial in directing that part of development or else it can be entirely missed.
OTOH, government efforts at teaching learning have failed at nearly every level for a century ++
Now think about something more complex than merely reading. What are the chances government is good at enabling it at a wide scale?
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Well as pointed out above, there's a "military science" Venn diagram, but yeah generally speaking I think the .gov funding the academy is distortionary and bad.
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