So in other words, these parasites weren't taxed enough. Yes, that sounds familiar, I just don't see how it's an argument for abolishing taxation.
Well, in an overtaxed situation, the people in power make allowances for their cronies. I see it as some that is concurrent and synergistic in its harm with overtaxation. As has been pointed out in this thread, it's easy to see how overtaxation can come from excluding a considerable portion of your tax base.
But it also works in reverse. The higher the taxes, the more incentive there is to corrupt government in your favor. For example, if you have $10 billion in raw income and you have to pay $5 billion of that in taxes, then you can offer up to $2.5 billion to pay for a tax cut of 50%. That buys a lot of lobbying and bribes.
In other words, high taxes are a huge built in incentive to corrupt the government. It's also easier to justify legitimate sounding loopholes since those poor companies have to pay so much in the first place.
My view is that it'd be better to have a lower tax rate with far less loopholes (or even no loopholes at all!) than the current systems in all their gameable glory.
Well, what makes it ludicrous? Government obviously exists. The people that run it are an elite. They have special powers and special privileges (for example, even the basic worker has some degree of immunity to lawsuits from sovereign immunity and a long term job). It has a secure revenue stream and not much in the way of accountability or need to provide a valid service. That makes it parasitic.
Oh.. I don't know the first passed health care reform in almost 100 years.
My view is that it can't be health care reform because it makes the problems that it alleges to solve worse. For example, it greatly expands health insurance coverage and subsidizes a bunch of people, My view is that either you'll end up with a hugely expensive subsidy or people who can't get insurance even with the subsidy.
Or lower medicare payments without doing anything to make the underlying health care activities cheaper to perform.
And there's the unconstitutional aspects of the law.
OTOH, that does seem par for bills that have "reform" in the title.
I genuinely do not understand why americans, particularly the ones who frequent tech boards, think a third party would actually be helpful. Well I understand why it's on tech boards, there are the automated shills and a particular ideological attraction to a point of view, but in practical political terms it's silly. I live in canada, we've had at one point 5 parties holding federal seats, and now have 4. 60% of the population *doesn't* like the current government, but he has essentially absolute power (within the confines of parliamentary power) because he has a majority of seats. The 'extra' parties just divide the vote up, and whether you do that as a proportional representation and require pork project trading by MP's across party lines or do it at a smaller level of pouring resources into contested districts the net effect of bad federal policy (or at least inefficient policy) is the same.
Because that isn't how the US system works. The office of the presidency is a separate election and a third party or independent candidate can in theory get in independent of congressional elections. Supported in Congress is nearly irrelevant to the above election (unless no one gets enough electoral votes to become president) though obviously a firmly antagonistic Congress significantly hinder a president in office.
Frankly, a good approach seems to be have two elections. The first to pick the best two candidates and the second to pick which of the two becomes president (or senator, representative, etc). That would take a constitutional amendment, so it probably isn't going to happen.
As to two parties versus a more divisive number. A key problem in US politics is the Democrat/Republican oligopoly. Having more effective parties in the mix would shake things up a bit and I think it might help with the corruption as well.
For similar examples, consider the notional (or nominal in case of stock options) amount of derivatives. It's just a number connected to the derivative, usual a hypothetical value of an underlying asset which the derivative is derived from (hence, the name).
Estimates of such instruments put the total notional amount of derivatives somewhere around a big chunk of a quadrillion US dollars. The actual valuation is orders of magnitude lower. And if someone owned all that and tried to convert to hard dollar valued assets, they'd probably lose another order of magnitude from the firesale of such a vast amount of securities.
The point is that there are vast, relatively meaningless numbers routinely attached to financial activities. Just because HFT is generating 70% or for that matter 99.9% (which isn't impossible down the road, I might add) of the volume doesn't mean that HFT somehow is of greater significance than the longer term trades that happen on the market.
Churn isn't economic activity. Nor does it set the long term value of a stock or other security.
Another way to look at it is the distinction between weather and climate, which is another example of a divide of phenomena by time scale (and to some degree spatial scale as well). If we have some unusually cold or warm weather, we shouldn't take that to mean that the climate is now colder or warmer than it was. Similarly, even if the climate has changed, we can occasionally expect unusual weather for the new climate.
Phenomena on different time scales can have tenuous connections. And in the stock markets, that time scale difference can be oh, a billion to a trillion between the traders dealing in microsecond trades and the traders who buy a few times a year. I just don't think that there's much of a connection at all, and what does exist is indirect and inherited from intermediate time scale traders interacting with the extremes.
You are claiming that 70% of volume means HFT is somehow significant
Kind of fits the definition doesn't it?
Of course, I disagree. Look at who holds the stock at the end of the day. The HFT people aren't going to be holding stock any more than the market makers of the past did. It's the same people as before who hold the stock for days or longer.
And those relatively longer term traders pay about the same as they did in the good old days, maybe a bit less due to the finer price increments of the markets and greater competition among brokers and trade systems.
The HFT market could increase its volume by another order of magnitude or more, and yet it would still not change who owns the stock at the end of the day. That's why I say that huge volume is insignificant.
No offence, but you're trying really hard to ram a square peg into a round hole here.
Eh, I thought it was a good analogy. But maybe I should abandon it.
But going back to the original concern, I don't buy that the instability introduced by HFT is either all that significant or that large. It's worth remembering that anyone who introduces too much volatility into a market, loses money, more as the degree of the volatility increases. There are several means to profit from excessive volatility, so I'm not concerned about that getting out of hand.
This topic being that completely discreet and decentralized HFTs destabilize modern financial sector severely enough to cause significant noticeable manifestations of these problems in real economy, such as "flash crashes" reducing availability of financing of industrial projects due to increase of volatility.
What would be the mechanism by which flash crashes would do that? IMHO, it's bizarre to even claim that they'd have that effect.
The entire point is that they do not. There is no control over the entire system.
Sure there is. I mentioned that all the groups involved each have their own control systems.
To make unstable fighter fly, you need a computer system running compex algoritms that control the ENTIRE SYSTEM AS A WHOLE.
But the same computer doesn't fly all the jets.
All we have is individual servos and there is absolutely no unified control over them. Hence, various flash crashes due to human interference being just as late as it would be in an unstable aircraft.
A flash crash is not a genuine crash. It'd be more like a bit of turbulence. Something the plane passes through quickly and is forgotten.
Suddenly we're talking about empires, not societies. Do you seriously propose that the Communist attempt to build an "empire" failing was a bad thing? Or that empires are the way to go generally?
Not at all. I merely pointed out a common problem in a category of large, well-known civilizations.
Empires are generally about exploitation, not mutual good.
That's generally the case with taxation. So it sounds to me like a poor excuse to ignore the argument.
Don't see why it's so interesting. The most spectacular civilizations of ancient times were empires. They're big and well known, they generate a lot of exciting wars in their making and dissolution, and they tend to be at the center of a lot of historical changes.
I suppose it'd be better to discuss relative taxation policies of Ancient Greece or the Hanseatic League. These are collections of confederacies of city states that would probably show better the impact of relative taxation on their fortunes. But I don't have a clue about those details, so I didn't mention them.
The Roman Empire in particular is a very interesting story of economic collapse. There was a long process of dysfunction that grew worse as time went on. A lot of today's tricks of the trade were tried by the government at one time or another: debasing the currency and inflation, price-fixing, fancy taxation schemes, bread and circuses, etc. But Rome never addressed what I see as the fundamental driver, the accumulation of wealth and power by a small group of parasites, here a set of families of Rome and bureaucrats of the empire.
The source of public funding is the public So you're saying EVERYONE in the public don't want science for science's sake?
Obviously the people getting the low obligation money would want it. But public funding is not free. It comes from someone. And frankly, I think those people deserve the money more than pretend science does.
No one made the mistake of seeing failure as a bad thing, hence why your observation is irrelevant to the argument.
I never said anyone made the mistake of seeing failure as a bad thing, so you calling my observation irrelevant is what's irrelevant.;)
So let me get this right. You make a point that never was in contention. You now claim that you knew it was never in contention. And you continue to repeat it. Why?
Another activity that has a high risk to it is being a victim of fraud. Except that there's no silver lining to it.
The problem as I see it, is that when you don't have any grounds for evaluating the near future potential of scientific work, then productive scientists look exactly like ones who won't ever deliver scientific output of note. It's not the possibly high failure rate of the activity, but the inability to distinguish between someone with a high failure rate and a few good successes and someone who will never have successes.
Well, like it or not, you don't have any grounds. How do you even decide those grounds? Near future utility? How near is that? 5 years? 1 year? 50 years? Utility to who? "Society"? Who in society? Maybe I discovered the 100% foolproof way to track individuals' thoughts to prevent thoughtcrime. I'm sure various interest groups in society would find a lot of "utility" out of that, but others would probably want me dead
Five years is a good number. If you can't prove you're doing something useful in that time frame, then you might as well be flipping burgers.
If you're so afraid that you can't who's , then you might as well not fund anybody at all....or, you do what free market capitalist businessmen do everyday, and take some risk.
Did someone show "fear" in this thread somewhere? Are people who you think you disagree with naturally afraid? What is the basis of this accusation?
And the reason I don't advocate taking such "risks" with taxpayer money is because I have respect not fear for where that money came from. If this activity is important to you, then put your own money into it, not someone else's who didn't have a choice in the matter.
Yes, the developed world has, for centuries, been vastly weather than the currently impoverished areas we're talking about. Pre industrial revolution, people in the western world were much better off, due to natural riches from ample forests, valuable minerals, good soil and climate, or even just nearby navigable waterways... Some parts of the world were simply lucky.
As I was saying, no that is wrong. The Western world wasn't wealthier.
The developed world was also in that situation and it didn't need a wealthier part of the world to bail it out.
Yes it did. History is filled with examples, such as Roman conquest resulting in infrastructure development, and other fringe benefits. In the US, there's no question the wealthier cities / states substantially subsidized the infrastructure for the poorer states, and continue to do so to this day...
You haven't found one such example. Merely noting that some regions are somewhat wealthier than other regions doesn't magically create infrastructure of the sort discussed in this thread. Nor does it magically create subsidies. Someone has to build it and the history of the developed world shows this infrastructure building in great detail.
So force to, in other words, tax the rich and spend the money on public works.
There's this confusion between "rich" and my use of the term "elite". Sure, if you own a lot of wealth, you are some sort of elite. That could be because you provided a lot of value to the rest of the world, but it could also be because you know the right politicians. Most governments of the world naturally form parasitic classes who consume public funds.
Sure, you could tax more income that people earn from the government. But in the absence of any sort of control of that spending, it just means that more is spent to cover the taxation making the effort mostly irrelevant.
They [taxes] are the mutual obligation of everybody to help their society as far as they are able.
Except that there's a big of taxes that isn't. Some part of taxes is this nebulous obligation to "help" society. The rest is just twigs for somebody's nest.
That sacrifice has enabled the society they live in to flourish and take care of its poor and its sick, and provide government and justice and education and police and roads and airports and hospitals and electricity and water for the good of everyone.
And it's enabled a number of people to get very rich by knowing the right people or filling out the right paperwork.
Just because you don't directly benefit from a service and you share in its cost, doesn't mean you don't benefit at all.
This veers into the realm of bullshit rationalizations. One can always come up with a "benefit" no matter how contrived, spurious, or nebulous it has to be.
For example, insurance, whether its private or public, would never work if you pay only when you need it.
You mean negative consequences which threaten your cash flow are somehow equivalent to insurance? No, they are different things. The need for insurance precedes the harm it is meant to insure against. So it would be payed only when you want/"need" it.
Please name a few empires where this actually occurred.
The Roman Empire after about 200 AD. A number of Chinese empires, for example, the Han dynasty (it's so common in their history that it becomes part of the way that the mandate of Heaven is lost). And the Mughals of India. The loss of England's American colonies. The decline of the Spanish empire and the loss of its American territories.
In modern times, the Ottoman empire in the 19th century. A number of communist attempts to take over countries (particularly, the failure to annex Chile into the sphere of influence). The current weakness of the less economically sound members of the EU looks to me to be another such decline.
A couple centuries ago, most of the developed world was as least as bad off as the Third World is now.
The developed world wasn't always rich.
Building infrastructure where people live on $200/year means few if any can afford to use that infrastructure, and the difficulty of installing it will never be recouped.
The developed world was also in that situation and it didn't need a wealthier part of the world to bail it out.
The way the electric grid started in New York bears no resemblance to the early grid in Florida. The water and sewage works are very different in the middle of the desert than they are in coastal areas.
That means one is more likely to find historical examples relevant to their current situation.
Well in that case the assertion that all research should have near-future applications is vacuous because one near-future application is "well, this doesn't work".
And why should I consider that an application? Sounds to me like you're drawing an unwarranted assumption from my post.
Taxes also destroy civilizations. A classic phase of a lot of dead empires is the squandering phase where an elite, which profits off of taxation by the empire, gets too greedy and kills the golden goose by raising taxes too much and using too little of those funds to reinvest in the empire.
Lightning rods came far after electricity's discovery.
But not after the first significant work on electricity. For example, they first figured out how to store electricity in 1745 (with the first capacitor) and the first lightning rod was developed in 1749 by Ben Franklin.
The obvious examples of how research with no obvious near future benefits is research with unknown near future benefits, research with long term benefits, and research with a possibility but not certainty of future benefits.
Examples which you don't give.
The big government-funded basic research programs have had near-future side-benefits that weren't really predicted.
And why were those big government-funded basic research programs done? There's all sorts of public justifications out there for those programs. Because it leads to benefits in a few centuries isn't the argument they lead with. Why did they pick who they picked to conduct those programs? It's because they had a purpose in mind other than just doing an activity for the sake of doing the activity.
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So in other words, these parasites weren't taxed enough. Yes, that sounds familiar, I just don't see how it's an argument for abolishing taxation.
Well, in an overtaxed situation, the people in power make allowances for their cronies. I see it as some that is concurrent and synergistic in its harm with overtaxation. As has been pointed out in this thread, it's easy to see how overtaxation can come from excluding a considerable portion of your tax base.
But it also works in reverse. The higher the taxes, the more incentive there is to corrupt government in your favor. For example, if you have $10 billion in raw income and you have to pay $5 billion of that in taxes, then you can offer up to $2.5 billion to pay for a tax cut of 50%. That buys a lot of lobbying and bribes.
In other words, high taxes are a huge built in incentive to corrupt the government. It's also easier to justify legitimate sounding loopholes since those poor companies have to pay so much in the first place.
My view is that it'd be better to have a lower tax rate with far less loopholes (or even no loopholes at all!) than the current systems in all their gameable glory.
Well, what makes it ludicrous? Government obviously exists. The people that run it are an elite. They have special powers and special privileges (for example, even the basic worker has some degree of immunity to lawsuits from sovereign immunity and a long term job). It has a secure revenue stream and not much in the way of accountability or need to provide a valid service. That makes it parasitic.
4. You get the morality you can pay for. The so-called "more equal, harmonious society" just isn't affordable.
The Roberts court was wrong here and I won't choose to disregard the Constitution just because they did.
Oh.. I don't know the first passed health care reform in almost 100 years.
My view is that it can't be health care reform because it makes the problems that it alleges to solve worse. For example, it greatly expands health insurance coverage and subsidizes a bunch of people, My view is that either you'll end up with a hugely expensive subsidy or people who can't get insurance even with the subsidy.
Or lower medicare payments without doing anything to make the underlying health care activities cheaper to perform.
And there's the unconstitutional aspects of the law.
OTOH, that does seem par for bills that have "reform" in the title.
I genuinely do not understand why americans, particularly the ones who frequent tech boards, think a third party would actually be helpful. Well I understand why it's on tech boards, there are the automated shills and a particular ideological attraction to a point of view, but in practical political terms it's silly. I live in canada, we've had at one point 5 parties holding federal seats, and now have 4. 60% of the population *doesn't* like the current government, but he has essentially absolute power (within the confines of parliamentary power) because he has a majority of seats. The 'extra' parties just divide the vote up, and whether you do that as a proportional representation and require pork project trading by MP's across party lines or do it at a smaller level of pouring resources into contested districts the net effect of bad federal policy (or at least inefficient policy) is the same.
Because that isn't how the US system works. The office of the presidency is a separate election and a third party or independent candidate can in theory get in independent of congressional elections. Supported in Congress is nearly irrelevant to the above election (unless no one gets enough electoral votes to become president) though obviously a firmly antagonistic Congress significantly hinder a president in office.
Frankly, a good approach seems to be have two elections. The first to pick the best two candidates and the second to pick which of the two becomes president (or senator, representative, etc). That would take a constitutional amendment, so it probably isn't going to happen.
As to two parties versus a more divisive number. A key problem in US politics is the Democrat/Republican oligopoly. Having more effective parties in the mix would shake things up a bit and I think it might help with the corruption as well.
For similar examples, consider the notional (or nominal in case of stock options) amount of derivatives. It's just a number connected to the derivative, usual a hypothetical value of an underlying asset which the derivative is derived from (hence, the name).
Estimates of such instruments put the total notional amount of derivatives somewhere around a big chunk of a quadrillion US dollars. The actual valuation is orders of magnitude lower. And if someone owned all that and tried to convert to hard dollar valued assets, they'd probably lose another order of magnitude from the firesale of such a vast amount of securities.
The point is that there are vast, relatively meaningless numbers routinely attached to financial activities. Just because HFT is generating 70% or for that matter 99.9% (which isn't impossible down the road, I might add) of the volume doesn't mean that HFT somehow is of greater significance than the longer term trades that happen on the market.
Churn isn't economic activity. Nor does it set the long term value of a stock or other security.
Another way to look at it is the distinction between weather and climate, which is another example of a divide of phenomena by time scale (and to some degree spatial scale as well). If we have some unusually cold or warm weather, we shouldn't take that to mean that the climate is now colder or warmer than it was. Similarly, even if the climate has changed, we can occasionally expect unusual weather for the new climate.
Phenomena on different time scales can have tenuous connections. And in the stock markets, that time scale difference can be oh, a billion to a trillion between the traders dealing in microsecond trades and the traders who buy a few times a year. I just don't think that there's much of a connection at all, and what does exist is indirect and inherited from intermediate time scale traders interacting with the extremes.
You are claiming that 70% of volume means HFT is somehow significant
Kind of fits the definition doesn't it?
Of course, I disagree. Look at who holds the stock at the end of the day. The HFT people aren't going to be holding stock any more than the market makers of the past did. It's the same people as before who hold the stock for days or longer.
And those relatively longer term traders pay about the same as they did in the good old days, maybe a bit less due to the finer price increments of the markets and greater competition among brokers and trade systems.
The HFT market could increase its volume by another order of magnitude or more, and yet it would still not change who owns the stock at the end of the day. That's why I say that huge volume is insignificant.
No offence, but you're trying really hard to ram a square peg into a round hole here.
Eh, I thought it was a good analogy. But maybe I should abandon it.
But going back to the original concern, I don't buy that the instability introduced by HFT is either all that significant or that large. It's worth remembering that anyone who introduces too much volatility into a market, loses money, more as the degree of the volatility increases. There are several means to profit from excessive volatility, so I'm not concerned about that getting out of hand.
This topic being that completely discreet and decentralized HFTs destabilize modern financial sector severely enough to cause significant noticeable manifestations of these problems in real economy, such as "flash crashes" reducing availability of financing of industrial projects due to increase of volatility.
What would be the mechanism by which flash crashes would do that? IMHO, it's bizarre to even claim that they'd have that effect.
So what you're saying is yes, overtaxation helped kill these empires, but there was some nuance to how it did that.
The entire point is that they do not. There is no control over the entire system.
Sure there is. I mentioned that all the groups involved each have their own control systems.
To make unstable fighter fly, you need a computer system running compex algoritms that control the ENTIRE SYSTEM AS A WHOLE.
But the same computer doesn't fly all the jets.
All we have is individual servos and there is absolutely no unified control over them. Hence, various flash crashes due to human interference being just as late as it would be in an unstable aircraft.
A flash crash is not a genuine crash. It'd be more like a bit of turbulence. Something the plane passes through quickly and is forgotten.
Suddenly we're talking about empires, not societies. Do you seriously propose that the Communist attempt to build an "empire" failing was a bad thing? Or that empires are the way to go generally?
Not at all. I merely pointed out a common problem in a category of large, well-known civilizations.
Empires are generally about exploitation, not mutual good.
That's generally the case with taxation. So it sounds to me like a poor excuse to ignore the argument.
Don't see why it's so interesting. The most spectacular civilizations of ancient times were empires. They're big and well known, they generate a lot of exciting wars in their making and dissolution, and they tend to be at the center of a lot of historical changes.
I suppose it'd be better to discuss relative taxation policies of Ancient Greece or the Hanseatic League. These are collections of confederacies of city states that would probably show better the impact of relative taxation on their fortunes. But I don't have a clue about those details, so I didn't mention them.
The Roman Empire in particular is a very interesting story of economic collapse. There was a long process of dysfunction that grew worse as time went on. A lot of today's tricks of the trade were tried by the government at one time or another: debasing the currency and inflation, price-fixing, fancy taxation schemes, bread and circuses, etc. But Rome never addressed what I see as the fundamental driver, the accumulation of wealth and power by a small group of parasites, here a set of families of Rome and bureaucrats of the empire.
Try flying an unstable jet without those computers. You'll end up far worse then current market does.
The HFT crowd has the computers as well. So do their markets and regulators. I don't see your point here.
The source of public funding is the public So you're saying EVERYONE in the public don't want science for science's sake?
Obviously the people getting the low obligation money would want it. But public funding is not free. It comes from someone. And frankly, I think those people deserve the money more than pretend science does.
No one made the mistake of seeing failure as a bad thing, hence why your observation is irrelevant to the argument.
I never said anyone made the mistake of seeing failure as a bad thing, so you calling my observation irrelevant is what's irrelevant.;)
So let me get this right. You make a point that never was in contention. You now claim that you knew it was never in contention. And you continue to repeat it. Why?
Another activity that has a high risk to it is being a victim of fraud. Except that there's no silver lining to it.
The problem as I see it, is that when you don't have any grounds for evaluating the near future potential of scientific work, then productive scientists look exactly like ones who won't ever deliver scientific output of note. It's not the possibly high failure rate of the activity, but the inability to distinguish between someone with a high failure rate and a few good successes and someone who will never have successes.
Well, like it or not, you don't have any grounds. How do you even decide those grounds? Near future utility? How near is that? 5 years? 1 year? 50 years? Utility to who? "Society"? Who in society? Maybe I discovered the 100% foolproof way to track individuals' thoughts to prevent thoughtcrime. I'm sure various interest groups in society would find a lot of "utility" out of that, but others would probably want me dead
Five years is a good number. If you can't prove you're doing something useful in that time frame, then you might as well be flipping burgers.
If you're so afraid that you can't who's , then you might as well not fund anybody at all. ...or, you do what free market capitalist businessmen do everyday, and take some risk.
Did someone show "fear" in this thread somewhere? Are people who you think you disagree with naturally afraid? What is the basis of this accusation?
And the reason I don't advocate taking such "risks" with taxpayer money is because I have respect not fear for where that money came from. If this activity is important to you, then put your own money into it, not someone else's who didn't have a choice in the matter.
Yes, the developed world has, for centuries, been vastly weather than the currently impoverished areas we're talking about. Pre industrial revolution, people in the western world were much better off, due to natural riches from ample forests, valuable minerals, good soil and climate, or even just nearby navigable waterways... Some parts of the world were simply lucky.
As I was saying, no that is wrong. The Western world wasn't wealthier.
The developed world was also in that situation and it didn't need a wealthier part of the world to bail it out.
Yes it did. History is filled with examples, such as Roman conquest resulting in infrastructure development, and other fringe benefits. In the US, there's no question the wealthier cities / states substantially subsidized the infrastructure for the poorer states, and continue to do so to this day...
You haven't found one such example. Merely noting that some regions are somewhat wealthier than other regions doesn't magically create infrastructure of the sort discussed in this thread. Nor does it magically create subsidies. Someone has to build it and the history of the developed world shows this infrastructure building in great detail.
So force to, in other words, tax the rich and spend the money on public works.
There's this confusion between "rich" and my use of the term "elite". Sure, if you own a lot of wealth, you are some sort of elite. That could be because you provided a lot of value to the rest of the world, but it could also be because you know the right politicians. Most governments of the world naturally form parasitic classes who consume public funds.
Sure, you could tax more income that people earn from the government. But in the absence of any sort of control of that spending, it just means that more is spent to cover the taxation making the effort mostly irrelevant.
They [taxes] are the mutual obligation of everybody to help their society as far as they are able.
Except that there's a big of taxes that isn't. Some part of taxes is this nebulous obligation to "help" society. The rest is just twigs for somebody's nest.
That sacrifice has enabled the society they live in to flourish and take care of its poor and its sick, and provide government and justice and education and police and roads and airports and hospitals and electricity and water for the good of everyone.
And it's enabled a number of people to get very rich by knowing the right people or filling out the right paperwork.
Just because you don't directly benefit from a service and you share in its cost, doesn't mean you don't benefit at all.
This veers into the realm of bullshit rationalizations. One can always come up with a "benefit" no matter how contrived, spurious, or nebulous it has to be.
For example, insurance, whether its private or public, would never work if you pay only when you need it.
You mean negative consequences which threaten your cash flow are somehow equivalent to insurance? No, they are different things. The need for insurance precedes the harm it is meant to insure against. So it would be payed only when you want/"need" it.
But "Fuck you, I've got mine", amiright?
No, the problem is that you got mine.
Please name a few empires where this actually occurred.
The Roman Empire after about 200 AD. A number of Chinese empires, for example, the Han dynasty (it's so common in their history that it becomes part of the way that the mandate of Heaven is lost). And the Mughals of India. The loss of England's American colonies. The decline of the Spanish empire and the loss of its American territories.
In modern times, the Ottoman empire in the 19th century. A number of communist attempts to take over countries (particularly, the failure to annex Chile into the sphere of influence). The current weakness of the less economically sound members of the EU looks to me to be another such decline.
A couple centuries ago, most of the developed world was as least as bad off as the Third World is now.
The developed world wasn't always rich.
Building infrastructure where people live on $200/year means few if any can afford to use that infrastructure, and the difficulty of installing it will never be recouped.
The developed world was also in that situation and it didn't need a wealthier part of the world to bail it out.
The way the electric grid started in New York bears no resemblance to the early grid in Florida. The water and sewage works are very different in the middle of the desert than they are in coastal areas.
That means one is more likely to find historical examples relevant to their current situation.
My view is that if you can't justify your efforts with near future benefits, then it is welfare not research.
Your view is objectively wrong.
Then you should able to show that, not merely make an unsupported claim.
Well in that case the assertion that all research should have near-future applications is vacuous because one near-future application is "well, this doesn't work".
And why should I consider that an application? Sounds to me like you're drawing an unwarranted assumption from my post.
Taxes buy civilization.
Taxes also destroy civilizations. A classic phase of a lot of dead empires is the squandering phase where an elite, which profits off of taxation by the empire, gets too greedy and kills the golden goose by raising taxes too much and using too little of those funds to reinvest in the empire.
Lightning rods came far after electricity's discovery.
But not after the first significant work on electricity. For example, they first figured out how to store electricity in 1745 (with the first capacitor) and the first lightning rod was developed in 1749 by Ben Franklin.
The obvious examples of how research with no obvious near future benefits is research with unknown near future benefits, research with long term benefits, and research with a possibility but not certainty of future benefits.
Examples which you don't give.
The big government-funded basic research programs have had near-future side-benefits that weren't really predicted.
And why were those big government-funded basic research programs done? There's all sorts of public justifications out there for those programs. Because it leads to benefits in a few centuries isn't the argument they lead with. Why did they pick who they picked to conduct those programs? It's because they had a purpose in mind other than just doing an activity for the sake of doing the activity.