Timothy Sandefur's Reply...

It's funny, I have the impression he doesn't get at all how science works. The usual "better, cheaper" comment regarding Celera is a nice testimony of ignoring that every scientist on the planet is standing on the shoulders of giants -most of which have been funded with public money. That includes the scientists at Celera. So it's simply nonsense to suggest that Celera demonstrates how private money is better and more efficient - Celera didn't work only with private money. They used plenty of previously generated knowledge and profited from public money -not just from the US taxpayer but worldwide.

Likewise the usual comment about pure research. Pure research is what comes up with the mechanisms and techniques and the knowledge applications are constructed out of. He's trying to build a skyscraper top-down generating the material from the air he's hanging in. With no foundation and nothing to work with, applied research quite simply has nothing to do. It took about 50 years from the discovery of the Philadelphia chromosome to the development of Gleevec, not the least because the technologies to profit from the knowledge had not yet been invented. The basic knowledge of the Ph-Chromosome however was critically necessary - you can't target a drug to a molecular mechanism if you don't know the mechanism. But no corporation can invest for such timeframes. Pharmaceutical companies start out with plenty of debt anyway. At some point, investors want to see returns - and that means during their lifespan.

I work in the industry - not pharma, but diagnostics. He mixes up corporations with charity, and he is seriously off in the importance of charity for the overall investment.

Mr. Sandefur's new arguments are tighter than the old ones, but at the expense of being much less compelling. In his new post he gives four arguments; #1 is that government funding of science is wasteful, and #s 2 and 4 is that it is unnecessary (i.e. the private sector does it and can do it better). None of these have the strength of "its immoral" or "its unconstitutional" but IMO they hold together a bit better.

I'll respond to #3, then offer Mr. Sandefur a possible solution.

Sandefur says in #3:

Dunford also argues that some kinds of research wonât be provided by private industry because it is potentially inimical to their plans...I see no reason to believe this. In fact, in a free marketâthat is, a market where nuisance law is strongly enforcedâit would actually be much more in their interest to research the possibility that their activities might lead to liability.

Objectivists argue the same thing. Such an argument might be true if corporations were organisms with a strong survival instinct - but they aren't. Corporations are composed of people, and the people will happily let a corporation die from bad long-term planning in order to make a short-term buck. Faced with crippling long-term liabilities, what happens a lot of time should be very obvious: golden parachutes for the people, bankruptcy for the corporation, followed by reformation of a similar but "new" company minus the liability - which the general citizenry gets stuck with. Mining companies don't restore their properties prior to sale - they just go bankrupt. Given such behavior it is obvious why some citizenry might feel compelled to use legislation to force companies to act for the long-term good.

So, the argument that corporations watch out for their long-term interests fails because people look out for their long-term interests, and those interests do not always align with the corporation's as an entity. In such cases, the corporation's best long-term interests take a back seat.

If you want to ensure that corporate people concern themselves with the long-term success of the corporation, you'll have to take some fairly draconian measures. You could, for instance, pay management 90% in stock and not allow them to sell it for 20 years.

***

Now for my suggestion. Mr. Sandefur keeps talking as if government support/non-support is mutually exclusive. But the U.S. has 50 individual states. 50 different potential social experiments. Why not let 50 different flowers bloom?
So I'm going to offer an alternative: stop arguing that the entire country should follow the libertarian model. Start arguing instead that the citizens of each State can be allowed to choose their R&D funding model. If some of them choose not to be libertarians, well, that's their choice isn't it?