Asri-unix.645 net.space utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!duke!chico!harpo!mhtsa!ihnss!cbosg!teklabs!ucbcad!ARPAVAX:C70:sri-unix!DIETZ@USC-ECL Tue Jan 26 08:24:14 1982 Government Funding "THERE remain those enterprises of such great value to all, and of so little value to any one, as to require public investment." - A.S. I reject this. Who judges the value of a project? Not the person forced to contribute. If it is of so little value to John Doe, why should he pay for it? Government investment (public investment is a misnomer) removes any choice the unwilling taxpayers have. It puts the "public good" above individual rights. In support of this, I point to all those pork-barrel projects that no sane businessman would invest in. Every one of them can be justified by a similar argument. Scientific research is more pork-barrel-ly than we'd like to think. ------- ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.