Science, Technology, and Government

Description

In this previously unpublished manuscript, found in the Rothbard Archives, Rothbard deftly turns the tables on the supporters of big government and their mandate for control of research and development in all areas of the hard sciences. What R&D should be encouraged and funded, what inventions should be supported, and what areas should be given research grants, etc.? These decisions can only be decided by markets unburdened by government meddling and intervention. Rothbard shows that science best advances under the free market: the claims to the contrary of the centralizers are spurious. The best course of action for government is to get out of the way ...

Ends with a quote from usury expert "of the Institute of Social Order"

• Bernard W. Dempsey, S.J., “The Worker As Person”, Review of Social Economy (March, 1954), pp. 19-20:

There are those who see in the mechanization of modern industry an inevitable and devastating anti-personal force.... First of all, man has been condemned to earn his bread in the sweat of his brow; and yet past ages have more sweat and less bread than typical American industrial workers experience.... Finally, the industrial discipline can also be challenging, interesting and inspiring, especially when an able mechanic is furnished good tools and materials to work with. We must not forget that the farmer is weather-paced, season-paced and animal-paced with a tyranny that is at least as exacting as the industrial discipline.... In the day of serfs in Western Europe the horse was the symbol of nobility and knighthood. Many American workers in the course of a day control more horse power than there was on the whole field of Agincourt.

He's seemingly more balanced than McNabb's (seeming) borderline Ludditism.

He makes some interesting points in his responses to objections against decentralized science: that

• obj. 1: it's wasteful to have multiple groups doing the same thing
  ad 1: but replication of experiments is a good thing!
• obj. 2: much money is needed to perform innovative experiments
  ad 2: ref:4.5: "Taking sixty-one of the most important inventions of the twentieth century … Jewkes et. al. found that more than half of these were the work of individual inventors—with the individuals working at their own directions, and with very limited resources."
  ref:4.6, also from Jewkes et al.: "we could not afford elaborate equipment, so we had to think."

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