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Comment by shantanubala | Hacker News Reader

I think you took his comment a bit too far: the point is that the government is an institution that is meant to mitigate risks that cannot efficiently be dealt with otherwise.

The risk of going to the moon before anyone else is such a risk (political motivations aside).

Stating that the government can be an effective tool for mitigating risks associated with research is not an endorsement of everything the government does. This is not an endorsement of everything governments have done in the past. This isn't even an endorsement of government at all in its current form.

It is a statement of what our government ought to be doing more of. It is a statement that our current system has disproportionately distributed rewards -- aren't we supposed to reward those who create the most value?

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I don't believe he went too far, I think he is just trolling. As someone who lost a close friend in a war and who had grandparents who lose relatives because of the Soviets and the Nazis, I think he's just talking bullshit in trying to advance the old Randian Gospel and its false dilemmas of calling everyone Socialists.

I was to answer him, but I could not believe he's doing this to listen,as he claim. I also would not hold my anger.

Well, considering that my family lost quote a few members to genocide I think I am entitled to detest war. And, no, I am not trolling. You shouldn't be angry at all. This is just a conversation.

Pointing out that the vast majority of the technology stemming from state-funded research came from military programs is nothing less than the truth.

Ok, I'll give you the benefit of doubt, I'm not angry anymore and realized it was stupid to be in the first place.

I'll not enter in a discussion with you here and now, politically I'm very pragmatic, although I'm pretty Conservative (As a Tory used to be some years ago). This post brought some memories (of my friend) which are uncomfortable in certain situations and with the due respect to my grandparents I'll also pass this one.

OK, I grant you that. I did say I wasn't aiming my post at him though. I've just seen a --in my eyes at least-- seemingly blind pro-government, pro public-sector bend in HN that always seems to float to the surface and I simply don't understand it. I'm not fighting it at this point because I clearly don't understand it. I have to understand it first before I can go past that. Not a molecule in my body thinks this way, so I need help.

As far as the distribution of rewards. The market decides that. Obviously the market --the average consumer-- does not think government is producing enough value or they would be flush with cash. If government produced real value we would be throwing money at them, me included.

With regards to the question of risky or very, very long term research.

Do we really believe government is good at this at all? I don't really see it that way. If you compare the evolution of technologies in private hands vs. that of publicly funded programs, what are the results?

Perhaps the best comparison is to compare efforts in the old Soviet Union with efforts in similar industries in the US. For all their might, the Soviets couldn't make a car worth a damn. During the same period in the US a multitude of private companies produced design after design and evolved solutions that were ages better than anything coming out of the Soviets.

Even Igor Sikorsky ultimately had to emigrate to the US in order to have his helicopter designs grow out of private efforts and evolve as they have. Little known fact: Composer Sergei Rachmaninov funded Sikorsky to the tune of $5,000 to help him launch his company.

Now, of course, as any good entrepreneur would do, you look for where you can sell your products. If government wants to buy you are not going to say "no". And, if government wants to throw more money at you to build other products for them you are going to follow suit. A lot had to happen before government could shovel money at Sikorsky. Other similar stories abound.

Then there's the question of whether or not government is actually equipped to truly make long reaching decision. Few decisions are really made with a clear view of what the future outcome might be. Why did we go to the moon? It was part of an arms race with the Soviets. Not much more than that. Again, war. I have a very fundamental problem with this idea of doing all of these things and spending all of this money to be better at war-making. It really stinks.

Was the lunar program truly worth the investment? Could we have produced similar or better results through other programs?

I am watching companies like SpaceX with great interest. The drive, focus and priorities private enterprise has, when combined with people hell-bent to make it happen, cannot be paralleled by any organization assembled by government. The mindset is massively different.

We could point at side benefits of technologies like GPS. Great stuff, right? Again, what was the motivator? Military. War. More efficient killing. Yuk! The civilian use of GPS was never a part of the program or the driving motivators.

And so, nearly all "good" technology that has come out of any government effort is almost always linked to military needs. If there are no military needs government either does not do it or they fail miserably.

This is the aspect of the whole pro-government, pro-public sector, pro-state-funded mentality I am not getting. You can't point at ARPANET as a state-funded research success without pointing at the thousand or millions (who knows) of people it was surely responsible for helping kill. One goes with the other. There is not dividing line. The state did not initiate these programs to help milk cows or to help us buy books online. They launched and funded these programs to create better killing systems for the wars they need to conduct.

I know I am harping on the military connection. I am eager to have someone provide me with a list of state-funded technologies that DO NOT have their genesis in a fundamental military need. I really can't think of one off the top of my head. Not one.

And so, being pro government/public sector/state and singing the praises of all this wonderful technology we should be so thankful for is tantamount to being thankful for, and supporting, all of the military programs and wars that inspire them. If you elevate what we have received from these government programs and ignore the wars and killing that brought the technologies in to existence you are being a hypocrite. I sincerely doubt that most of the folks who express pro-state views on HN are war-mongers.

And that's when my brain short circuits and I just don't get it.

I'd love to understand.

> I'd love to understand.

In my biased opinion I'd suggest you study western and northern European democracies. The government provides essential services (decentralized up to the district level) like education, water, streets, police, health care, social security for it's citizens.

I'd rather have clean water and unbiased police and justice and free education. Every private company needs to maximize their own profit. The government does not need to do this. They can subsidize important but nonprofitable projects. This can be and has been made efficient.

There is no interest in a private prison company to reduce crime. There is also not much reason for a private rail company to invest in infrastructure that not profitable. But as a citizen I have an interest to use a efficient train.

It's not black and white. Private sector is very good at a lot of things. But there are certain other things that are natural monopolies or important for the functioning of the society that in my opinion can be best served by an efficient government.

The private sector and capitalism do not also not always work in your interest - Adam Curtis from the BBC (also government :) did a great documentation about certain effects of free market radicalism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mayfair_Set

> The government provides essential services (decentralized up to the district level) like education, water, streets, police, health care, social security for it's citizens.

I wonder if herein lies the fundamental difference. I would never put it the way you have.

The people form the government and pay them to administer infrastructure and services for them. That is massively different than the "government does for it's people" view. One is almost a royals-and-subjects view while the other says, well, government of the people, by the people and for the people.

In my model we hire the government to serve us. They are nothing more than our employees.

The other data point I have is that as a youngster my family spent quite a number of years in Argentina. Monkeys would govern that country better than nearly any administration they have had to endure. I have followed their politics on and off over the years. To this day they continue to be raped and pillaged by their government. The only way you can characterize them is thugs, thieves and gangsters. It is quite possible that seeing some of the things I saw there planted the seeds for not seeing government as part of the solution as an adult. I mean, look at Cyprus.

If you really want to understand, do some reading. Different (conflicting) economic theories, history, philosophy..

It's quite easy to broaden ones perspective, if that's actually the goal.

I wouldn't look to a private prison company to reduce crime because that's not the need they are pursuing. The commercial war on crime tends to be waged by associations that roughly map to where/how crimes are committed and chambers of commerce. These organizations are the pooled efforts of businesses to fight common problems.

A private rail company might decide to lay down unprofitable track to massively grow demand and habitual preference for rail travel. Or, it might stick to more profitable tracks and in exchange not have to pass on the costs of disparate routes to the customers in the high-density areas.

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