May be good advice. I'll look into that.

Great article. Thanks for posting.

The Federal Government has no business being in business. It has specific, enumerated powers and research isn't one of them. If the People want to pass an Amendment giving the government the ability to tax us and waste billions on their cronies doing research (put Alzheimers and HIV aside, lets talk about influenza!). This is just another National Science Institute.

I am unable to find that part of the Constitution authorizing the government to do any research in medicine. I guess Shaffer was right. "The Constitution is that sacred document which prevents the government from doing all the terrible things it does." ~~ Professor Butler Shaffer

Great to see such a robust, intelligent discussion of these issues. I really appreciate it. I am going to read them again, now. I lot to learn.

Avoid neurotoxins as best you can, for starters. Americans are probably subject to more neurotoxins than anybody else. Our environment is rife with them. No, we don't need a tinfoil hat, either...haha...

I read that paragraph again, and while it may be clear to you it still isn't clear to me, and I suspect it is unclear to many other readers. In that paragraph and the following one, it is difficult to disentangle which positions represent your beliefs and which ones you ascribe to others. When you say "government funding of scientific research has a justification", I assume that the rest of your paragraph contains supporting arguments for that statement, and that you agree with Vannevar Bush's position. The paragraph that follows does nothing to dispel that impression. I still have no clear idea what your overall position is regarding government funding of scientific research.

There will be no cure found for Alzheimer's, cancer, no discovery of the cause of autism (while half the children born 14 years from now will end up with it - 85% of the boys). Nothing good will come from this mess. They lie. They cover up. They take the money and keep doing the same. Solutions will not be tolerated.

Reading it again, it is clear to me that I was continuing Vannevar Bush's argument. You read quickly and thought you understood, but you missed it.

I was not reading into your post arguments that I want to have, I was arguing based on what your post actually stated – such as, “So, the government should fund all the research it can afford. And the only way we know to judge what has potential and what does not is to accept the judgments our best academics.” If this is something other than your personal viewpoint, I didn’t get the message.

I do not have any objection to government-paid military doctors.

You misunderstand me. I believe that you are reading into my post arguments that you want to have. I agree with everything you said, but none of it contradicts what I said because my intention is to look at root issues, not seconday effects.

You are also wrong about the military need for medical research. Read about Walter Reed Hospital, but before you do, read about Walter Reed himself. It might be argued that we do not need government-paid military doctors, either; we could just let private agencies like the Red Cross handle war casualties. (Of course casualties during training might be a dfferent question, or maybe not.) If you want to discuss that rationally, based on the evidence, then we can do that.

A basic error in your approach (and in Walter Donway's) is to look at the literal wording of Objectivist political mandates rather than the reason for them. A strictly limiting constitution is just a statement of principles. No piece of paper will protect you from the mob. That is the very reason that Ayn Rand insisted that deeper philosophy (metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics) must precede poiltics. And that is the foundation supporting my post above.

You misunderstood me as advocating for unlimited government funding for research when I did not intend that at all. I was only pointing out the flaw in the logic that there is no basis for government-funded research. Certainly, you must know the Springfield Arsenal. The rest proceeds from there. Rand said again and again that resolving such issues as whether the government can explore weaponizing germs - and defending against them - remains for the future. And we might be in that future of hers. So, let us discuss what is and it not proper government research.

As for the fact that corporations are no smarter than governments, I pointed out that the marketplace limits the errors that people can make. It does so many ways. One way is by allowing and encouraging avenues of achievement for individuals who do not work well within corporations. Any examination of the history of successful enterprises demonstrates the differences between Hewlett Packard and General Motors -- and how the former came to emulate the latter, and what happened after that.

As for the atomic bomb, you seem not to have examined the contradictory premises that led to such a horror.

So a massive amount of government-controlled research is justified because corporations also make mistakes in directing their research funding, or because “there is no telling what lines of research will have military benefits”?

Misdirected groupthink at the corporate level harms mostly the corporation’s stockholders. Misdirected groupthink at the government level forces all of us to pay for its mistakes, and spawns political initiatives such as “combating global warming” that cost us exponentially more in terms of government control over our resources.

Military research belongs in the military budget, nowhere else. The atomic bomb was directed research building upon known processes (nuclear fission and eventually nuclear fusion) and with a military end in mind. Government health-related research has no such justification. It does not contribute to the mission of a limited government in preventing force and fraud. It belongs in the free market.

The argument that “there is no telling what lines of research will have military benefits” cannot be justified in Objectivist terms. To accept this argument opens up multiple cans of worms, such as a vastly increased budget for a universal “free college education” on the grounds that it might produce the next Einstein, or vastly increased health-related subsidies on the grounds that they may save the life of a great inventor. You can even justify heavy spending on preventing climate change, on the grounds that “you can never tell” what will happen to the climate otherwise.

The fact that you “can never tell” a specific outcome does not mean we should sanction any government intrusion into scientific research other than that directly necessary to the mission of a limited government. As Ayn Rand said, “Free scientific inquiry? The first adjective is redundant.”

Alzheimer's killed my mother and it was very slow and very ugly up until her very last stroke. By then she rarely knew where she was at.
Makes a 70-year-old dino wonder if he shall receive a diagnosis of the same certain very ugly death.
Contracting AIDs? Our former president may have lit up the White House with rainbow lights,
but save for a rare accidental contamination, contracting AIDs is knida like contracting lung cancer due to smoking, another life style choice.
As far as I know, you can't get Alzheimer's by putting something inside you, though rresearch may some day prove otherwise.
Who knows?

Thanks, Walter. The broad thesis is easy to agree with. "Force and freedom cannot compete." Power and market are mutually exclusive. So, every political decision must be economically inefficient. We accept that axiomtically and I would be open to any empirical evidence to the contrary.

That said, it remains that government funding of scientific research has a justification. As you said: "Force has a valid role protecting us against all criminals, domestic and foreign, who would harm us." It was World War II that convinced the federal government - as argued well by Vannevar Bush - that there is no telling what lines of research will have military benefits. Certainly, in 1923 no one was thinking of atomic bombs delivered by rockets. It was not even science fiction. So, the government should fund all the research it can afford. And the only way we know to judge what has potential and what does not is to accept the judgments our best academics.

A contrary argument would be to rely totally on the spontaneous order of the free market. No market justiifcation existed for the atomic bomb project. The Nazi Germans, the USSR, the Japanese, all were incapable of it and we, the free peoples, had no need for it. People wonder why Gen. Dwight Eisenhower wore five stars. It was because of his analysis of the military industrial capacity of the belligerents. The free market works.

But it works because it is multi-valued. In other words, no one actor decides broadly for many other actors. Each individual, each business, each household decides by their own standards. Among the benefits of that is the diffusion of cupidity. As you said: "The first scientists working on a disease entity, and publishing peer-reviewed results, were chosen, of course, to sit on the NIH and other government panels (“study sections”) to recommend grant funding. They tended to recommend proposals pursuing the line of research that had made their reputation, not lines of research that might challenge or overturn their work."

The free market does not prevent that. We know that. Corporate boards make bad decisions because individuals err. Then everyone goes along. Call it "group think" - a warning label launched in Fortune magazine. I see it as the "Abiliene Vacation." No one wanted to goto Abiliene, but they each thought that the others did. It is not just evil Nazis and evil Communists who fall into line. Peter Keating was a heck of a nice guy.

Objectivism is better. It is not so much the epistemology and aesthetics and politics, though those are the expressions. The essential is the sense of life. Ayn Rand's fiction - Anthem, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged - influenced many millions more than actually adhere to the specifics of the formal philosophy. The power of Objectivism rests on Ayn Rand's aesthetic appeal to people of independent judgement.

So, for every corprorate board grouply thinking that there is no money in this research or that, we have a person somewhere who thinks that the money is not as important as achieving the goals of discovery and invention.

We make a big deal out of capitalism. No system seems better. But it can be said that capitalism is not a "system" but the absence of system. It is spontaneous order.

As for Alzheimer's you are wrong because you are relying on the wrong experts. "For Alzheimer’s, there is no treatment, no cure, no prevention. If you are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and ask, “What can be done for me?” the answer, in bluntest terms, is: “Nothing.” . I think that if you open the question here, you will find a lot of answers: the right food, the right lifestyle; nutrition, supplements, exercise, brain games... And for all of that, perhaps the best professor I had died of it, despite food, exercise, and lifetime of brain games. Entropy kills. And there ain't no cure for that. (... or maybe there is...)