From: John Clark (jonkc@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Sat Dec 12 1998 - 00:03:21 MST
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Samael <Samael@dial.pipex.com>Wrote:
>PAP?
Private Protection Agencies.
>you have a system of government (I assume that's what the PAP is)
No.
>capitalism doesn't work for _everybody_,
That's where charity comes in. It's true that if everybody is hard hearted then
the weak will starve, but government can't help, if people won't give
voluntarily they won't vote for politicians to make them.
>Please define property.
No. Like all the most important things the meaning of this word comes from usage
not definitions.
>It doesn't have an intrinsic meaning.
A keen grasp of the obvious.
>Please show that exists anywhere but inside peoples minds.
Please explain why it needs to exist anywhere but inside people's minds.
>The government is there to act to make sure that those people who got
>there first, or who have the most power do not use that power to stop
>those without power from sharing in the objects that exist.
It's easy to understand why government politicians would make noises like that
with their mouth, but for the life of me I can't see why they would actually do
it. Making friends of the poor and the weak and enemies of the rich and powerful
is not a good strategy for a successful politician.
>The free market generally provides the best solution,
True
>but government is dead handy for avoid things like monopolies,
Not needed. Your company and mine produce all the steel made in the world. We
make a good profit now, but we want more, so we get together and double our
prices. Now we each make a huge profit on each ton of steel sold, so we would
both like to make lots and lots of steel. However, because the price of steel
is now very high demand is down, so part of our sinister plot must be an
agreement to limit production. The higher the price gets, the greater is the
temptation to secretly cheat on the agreement and produce more steel than
was agreed to, and that would kill the cartel.
There are even more problems for our poor cartel. Now that the price of
steel is sky high and the profits are huge, other companies will want to
get in on the act and start making steel. Also, consumers of steel will
not want to shell out all that money for that metal and will start looking
for replacement materials like wood or plastic or aluminum or composite fiber.
>unfair trade,
Not needed. I manufacture 99% of the worlds widgets, you make 1%. I want to
drive you out of business, so I figure I'll lower my price until you go broke
and then I can jack them up to anything I want. So now you louse money on each
widget you sell, the trouble is I do too. I have 99 times as much money as you
do, but I'm lousing it 99 times faster. Even worse, because the price is very
low the demand for widgets is huge, and if prices are to remain low I must build
more factories and increase production. I'm lousing money faster and faster,
meanwhile you just temporally halt production in your small factory and wait for
me to go broke. It won't be a long wait.
>basic research
Not needed. Just this a few months ago a very small private company, Geron
Corporation, found a, perhaps the, key to cellular aging. Last year another
small company found a way to clone mammals.
The breakthrough on High Temperature superconductors was made by IBM at their
Zurich laboratory, Muller and Benders, both IBM employees received Nobel
prizes. The very same IBM lab also made what is unquestionably the single
most important advance in Nanotechnology up to this point, The Scanning
Tunneling Microscope and earned another Nobel prize for IBM employees Binding
and Rorer. IBM is also where the newer Atomic Force Microscope and Magnetic
Resonance Microscope were invented. They used these machines to make the
smallest possible logo, spelling out the name "IBM" atom by atom a few years ago.
IBM didn't do everything, the first laser was made in May 1960 at the private
Hughes Research Laboratory by Harold Mamma. 60 years ago Bell Labs
discovered that some radio waves come from space and built the world's first
radio telescope, more recently Bell Labs revolutionized Cosmology by detecting
the 3 degree Kelvin black body background radiation from The BIG BANG and got
a Nobel Prize for it. Bell Labs also invented the transistor and got another
Nobel Prize for that. Texas Instruments invented the integrated circuit,
INTEL invented the microprocessor to fulfill a contract from a Japanese
calculator company.
A lot of good work comes from private universities. MIT was started in 1845
Largely with Ersatz Bigelow's money, he made a vast fortune in the power
loom manufacturing business. CAL TECH is also a privet institution, so is
Harvard, so is Yale, so is Princeton, so is Carnegie Mellon, so is The
Institute For Advanced Study, so is Stanford. Speaking of Stanford, Calvin
Quate of that privet university used an Atomic Force Microscope invented at IBM
to make the worlds smallest transistor. He was able to make lines less than 100
nanometers wide.
Most of the world's great telescopes were built with private funds donated by
rich men, including the largest of all, the 394 inch Keck on Mauna Kea,
a second private instrument of equal size recently became operational just
a few hundred feet away. I think it's interesting that one of the biggest
contributors to Big Science, Charles Yerkes, made much of his money by
building street car lines, until government put him out of business when
they decided they could run them much, much better. None of the men who
gave money for these things expected their telescope to make a profit.
If government wasn't around to steal a large pat of their money people like
this would give even more.
I don't want to oversell my case, there is no doubt that some good science
has come from government funded research, and that's not surprising
considering that government has trillions of dollars at it's disposal. Even a
monkey throwing around that kind of money would occasionally do some good.
John k Clark jonkc@att.net
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