> You don't have a right to make money. You certainly have a right to try, but if you fail that is your > problem - maybe your business plan depended on rights you don't have.
You are correct to say there is no right to be successful in business or industry.
However, there are other rights - such a private property - and violation of those rights will, as a consequence, make it impossible to be successful in certain types of business.
There is no right to be successful in those businesses, but there are other rights, and violation of those rights is ethically wrong - and it just happens to be one of the consequences is the impossibility of certain types of industry.
So the fact there is no right to be successful is irrelevant.
> The difference being that copyright in modern legal systems is explicitly there to give a temporary > monopoly to a creator of a work to promote the advances of the arts and science by granting a (time) > limited set of rights that you as a creator would not otherwise have.
It is wrong to say the holder "would not otherwise have" this right.
Ethically, it belongs to him - he invested the time and money to make it; it is *his property*.
> Another flaw in your reasoning is that the statement "If I make a beautiful carved wooden table, then > it's mine" isn't true. The defining trait of capitalism is that the workers sell their labour to a > capitalist, and now the corporation owns the table you just made.
Making a table requires three things;
1. tools 2. the raw wood 3. the skill as a carpenter
All three must be provided.
If you as an individual buy the wood and the tools and have the skills to work the wood and you make the table, it belongs to fully to you, for you have provided the tools, the materials and the labour.
If you're *employed* as a carpenter, someone else has provided the tools and the materials and is now providing the labour, by paying your wages. You do *NOT* own that table, because it rightfully belongs to someone else - the person who paid for the wood and the tools and the labour to have it created.
> So what are you, a Marxist, a troll, or both?
I'm civil, which is more than can be said for yourself.
> Shakespeare earned money from his plays and the performances. Why should his family continue to profit > from something done 600 years ago?
If I had an ancestor who built a house and my family lived in it for six hundred years, would it be wrong for my family to continue to benefit from it after such a long time? so that the house should now be in the public domain?
Why is this wrong for a house but right for a song or film or play?
I think it is because the song or film or play has a *property* such that it *can* be copied for free, and so we *do*, because by and large we lack an understanding or knowledge of what property rights really mean. We're selfish, we benefit from the theft, and we lack the knowledge to prevent us from acting in that way, despite the fact it's not actually in our best interest or indeed ethical.
> Except this is 50 years ex post facto. If anyone can copy your table after 50, would that make you go > back and uncreate it? I mean, after 50 years, if you haven't turned a profit on your first table, either > by selling it or appreciating its exclusivity, you're not going to. I think we can count on two hands > the number of songs that are still making money after 50 years.
It's still theft to take something which belongs to another person. I don't think it's right to argue taking something without permission is not theft is the item has no value. It is still a violation of that person's property rights.
> And most of the people who made them are dead.
Plenty of people live in houses which were made by people who are now dead.
If something has value, and it belongs to you, you can pass it down to your children, and it then rightfully belongs to them, and the theft is then against their property. The fact they didn't make the original item is irrelevant; it belongs to them.
> You make that sound as if it's a problem, but I'd guess that things would look much better if everybody > who's just in it for the money quit making tables.
Let's say I'm not in it "for the money".
Let's say I make tables because I love working with wood.
Don't I *STILL* need to sell them for money?
How can I spend all day carving if I don't have any cash?
And if I spend all day carving, how else am I going to make money other than selling the things I make?
> So-- you're up for paying royalties for the use of Aristotle's works? Or Shakespeare's plays?
In fact, with regard to Shakespeare's plays, what happens is that the publishing company publishes the plays and makes a profit, but Shakespeare's descendents (to whom the plays rightfully belong) get nothing.
Shakespeare worked hard to make those plays; and despite handing them down to his family, his family gets nothing.
What would be wrong with a part of the money I spend buying a book of a play going to his family?
> If I carve a table, I have a beautiful table. If you make a copy of it somehow, I still have my table but > so do you. I don't have anything less than I had before.
How do I recapture the time and money I spent making the table if other people make copies for free?
I cannot.
And since I cannot, I can't make the table in the first place, because I need to make money so I can feed myself and rent my flat and buy clothes.
> You always can do with your ideas whatever you want: you can keep them in your head, you can publish them, > you can tell your kids about them.
This is not true if copyright is taken away. You then cannot make money from your creations, because anyone else can make copies of them for free.
> You want something completely different: you want the power of the state to create a market place for > you where there ordinarily wouldn't be one.
In what sense?
It seems to me if I create something, it belongs to *me*. If I invest time and money making a beautiful carved wooden table, it's *mine*. If I invest time and money making a beautiful song, it's *mine*. The fact that some of the things I make have *properties* which lend them admirably to being placed in the public domain is utterly irrelevent. Ownership of an creation is held by the person who created it, regardless of its properties.
So it seems to me I'm using the power of the State to prevent theft.
> The ironic thing about whiners like you is that if your rule were implemented, you wouldn't be able to > create anything at all since inventors of basic ideas and creators of basic content are using license > enforcement to restrict others from building new stuff.
Whereas if anything which *can* be copied for free is legally permitted to be copied for free, production of such things will almost cease. How can I make songs or films or software, when they cost me time and money, when I cannot recapture those costs?
> The ironic thing about whiners like you is that if your rule were implemented
and
> Or, to put it bluntly: your ethics are screwed up, and so are your economics.
If you need to attack me, you are insecure in your arguments.
Who decides what is good? what happens if what is decided as good is harmful to members of that society?
Wasn't segregation justified in this way?
> No it's not, since it doesn't deprive you of anything.
Of course it does; if anyone can make a copy of the item for free, how can you recapture the time and money you invested in creating it?
And given that, you would have to stop creating these things - since you can't feed and clothe yourself doing it - and change jobs.
If there's one single action which will devestate any industry, it's removing the ability to make money from that industry, because people working in that industry are then obliged to change professions - and that entire industry basically disappears overnight.
The fact you can copy something a zillion times with no effort doesn't make a difference to the ethics of ownership.
If I make a beautiful carved wooden table, then it's mine, I invested a lot of time and money to make it. It can't be copied - but so what? it's mine, and no less or more mine because of it.
If I make a beautiful song, then it's mine, I invested a lot of time and money to make it. It can be copied at no cost whatsoever - but so what? it's mine, and no less or more mine because of it.
The *properties* of an object make no difference to who it rightfully belongs to. The fact than an object has properties which might well make it absolutely easy to pass it widely into the public domain does not mean that it is ethically right to do so.
> Tangable property should be taxed on death (possibly up to 100%).
Wouldn't that mean that in a couple of generations, the State would basically own everything?
If you get the urge to examine your thoughts in this matter, I'd like to point you at Milton Friedman's book "Capitalism and Freedom". He describes how economic freedom (e.g. private property rights and ensuring economic power is kept out of the hands of State) is vital to political freedom. If you can read this and still think that 100% tax at death is the right idea, I'd be very interested to understand your view.
I could be wrong, but I think you've conflated property rights with the ethical imperative to help others.
If I make a song, and I decide to keep it in the family, I've not caused harm to others - either by my action or by my inaction.
If I invest a cure for a terrible disease and I keep it in the family, I've caused others harm by my inaction - by not offering them the cure when I could have done so.
I would agree that for some knowledge, there is an ethical imperative to share that knowledge, and I think this is the case when harm is prevented by sharing. However, it does not count as "harm" to prevent someone from listening to a song, seeing a film or having a copy of the latest Oracle database.
If I'm a painter, and I create a great work of art, does it pass into the public domain after n years?
If I'm a programmer, and I create a wonderful piece of software, does it pass into the public domain after n years?
If I'm a singer, and I create a great song, does it pass into the public domain after n years?
Oh. It does. Erm, why?
It's basically judicial theft.
The ethical rule is this; if you make something, it belongs to you, and you can do what you want with it - and that includes handing it down to your kids to help them in their lives.
So the questions have to be: if the results of this research are so amazing;
1. why aren't companies like Pfizer investing in it? (probably they are?) 2. why doesn't the US Government have the sense to invest directly in such things?
Do we really have so little influence over the State, and the State is so stupid, that our best hope is to encourage the State to invest indirectly in such research by funding military development and hoping we get the sort of spin-off we're looking for?
And even more significantly, have we ACCEPTED this state of affairs?
Note also QoS doesn't actually solve all problems. For example, if you have two network applications running, and you want one of them to have priority such that it can take bandwidth from the other when it needs it - well, you're out of luck. QoS doesn't handle that situation.
> How do you choose without money? Education is expensive.
Education vouchers. Give people a bit of paper which says "this is 3000 dollars, but only when spent on education". You then let them spend it how they want.
> I've been re-reading that for about 10 minutes and I still can't figure out if you come from another planet or > you just have a very weird sense of humour.
I've read your reply just once but I have no hope of figuring out what you disagree with *because you haven't said*.
People who are poor get quite a bit richer if they don't have to pay the tax they currently pay which supports the education system. They use that money - and perhaps vouchers from the State, to ensure a minimum funding for their children - and *PICK THEIR SCHOOL*, because the schools will be private. Right now their kids go to the catchment school, they have no choice, and their kids are *screwed*.
> The US has had a state-run education system for approximately 140 years. It seems that during this period quite > a few brilliant scientists have been home grown.
I suspect that the rate of world-shaking scientists being produced isn't a particularly useful metric for measuring the performance of a national education system with millions of ordinary children and students.
And who is to say there wouldn't have been a lot more world-shaking scientists, had the people been able to pay for their own education and so *have* an education, unlike the current situation, where for example pretty much all poor downtown city dweller children are condemned to having no future whatsoever and so will never produce a world class scientist.
Good. Why are we giving 100 dollars in the shape of a laptop to children who don't have clean water?
> what you are describing is a world in which education in the sciences is the privilege of the economic elite.
That's the *current* world, where the elite go to Ivy League colleges because they pay privately and the poor are *forced* to send their children to the local hellhole schools where they are condemned to having no future whatsoever.
> what you are describing is a parochial eductation in which kids are never exposed to opposing points of view, > never introduced to subjects or skills which are inherently difficult or expensive to teach.
In the UK, students take out loans to pay for their education. They pay them back once they're working. Some subjects costs more than others - and the student, if they paid fees, would pay more for those subjects than others. What's the problem? people would be paying for themselves, so they get to choose what they want to do and, quite rightly, since they can pay for it themselves, doing so. I'd also point out the difference in price between courses isn't that much; a normal course is about 11,000 a year (UKP), I think a medical course (most expensive) is about 20,000.
> the state-run education system works fine everywhere else, proving you wrong.
Actually, speaking for the UK, the education system stinks and is a political football. I believe there is a global refrain that students are being taught skills which are no use at all when they come to work.
In fact, in a more general sense, I think teaching as we know it is completely bunk. You learn what you *do*, and in classes, what you *do* is you *don't* ask questions, you *accept* what you're told, you *know* that the teacher knows all the answers and you don't.
"Teaching As A Subversive Activity", by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner.
What teaching needs to give us is a bombproof *crap detector*; the ability to *ask questions* and to have an idea which questions should be asked.
What teaching actually gives us is the exact opposite of this.
> Of course you can argue this, but it should be from a general ethical perspective (i.e. this isn't the state's > job), rather than on the basis that state-funded education and research has failed.
I argue it from both of those basis'.
> Where was funding coming from in the days when the U.S. was the undisputed scientific leader (and expected to > remain so)? While some private entities were involved, most of it was government.
Thing is, this in and of itself demostrates nothing. Perhaps the US would have been twice as far ahead if funding had been done differently. The US, post WW2, was by itself over half the world economy. Of *course* it was likely to lead research, whether or not it was (for example) half as efficient in research as it could have been.
> The problem right now is that the U.S. government is being stupid about how it involves itself with education > and research (displaying bizarre priorities, and putting funding wherever the President, rather than the > actual educators, thinks it should go).
From my view, this is one of the undesireable properties of centralization of any form; power becomes increasingly subject to fewer and fewer individuals and so more and more open to abuse. However, I think that State taxing and then funding is wrong both ethically and in terms of effectiveness, as well as possessing these other undesireable properties.
> Because we are not trying to let people become an inbred elite while other people suffer.
You're saying private education would lead to elitism?
In what way exactly is the current State run system NOT leading to elitism?
If you're poor and live in a city, you're screwed - your kids will go to the most appalling school ever.
If you're better off, you live in a nicer neighbour and get a half-decent school.
If you're rich, you're Ivy League.
Private education would permit the poor the send their kids to much better schools - because they could *choose* the school their kids went to. It wouldn't make any difference to the well-off, since they go private already.
> Pure research without obvious practical application seldom happens in the commercial sector - there are too many > incentives to put the money elsewhere.
Widely repeated but I think untrue.
Think about say the big Japanese electronics firms, the big American industrial groups - they spend VAST amounts of money on fundamental R&D.
Slashdot Mirror
> You don't have a right to make money. You certainly have a right to try, but if you fail that is your
> problem - maybe your business plan depended on rights you don't have.
You are correct to say there is no right to be successful in business or industry.
However, there are other rights - such a private property - and violation of those rights will, as a consequence, make it impossible to be successful in certain types of business.
There is no right to be successful in those businesses, but there are other rights, and violation of those rights is ethically wrong - and it just happens to be one of the consequences is the impossibility of certain types of industry.
So the fact there is no right to be successful is irrelevant.
> The difference being that copyright in modern legal systems is explicitly there to give a temporary
> monopoly to a creator of a work to promote the advances of the arts and science by granting a (time)
> limited set of rights that you as a creator would not otherwise have.
It is wrong to say the holder "would not otherwise have" this right.
Ethically, it belongs to him - he invested the time and money to make it; it is *his property*.
> Another flaw in your reasoning is that the statement "If I make a beautiful carved wooden table, then
> it's mine" isn't true. The defining trait of capitalism is that the workers sell their labour to a
> capitalist, and now the corporation owns the table you just made.
Making a table requires three things;
1. tools
2. the raw wood
3. the skill as a carpenter
All three must be provided.
If you as an individual buy the wood and the tools and have the skills to work the wood and you make the table, it belongs to fully to you, for you have provided the tools, the materials and the labour.
If you're *employed* as a carpenter, someone else has provided the tools and the materials and is now providing the labour, by paying your wages. You do *NOT* own that table, because it rightfully belongs to someone else - the person who paid for the wood and the tools and the labour to have it created.
> So what are you, a Marxist, a troll, or both?
I'm civil, which is more than can be said for yourself.
> Shakespeare earned money from his plays and the performances. Why should his family continue to profit
> from something done 600 years ago?
If I had an ancestor who built a house and my family lived in it for six hundred years, would it be wrong for my family to continue to benefit from it after such a long time? so that the house should now be in the public domain?
Why is this wrong for a house but right for a song or film or play?
I think it is because the song or film or play has a *property* such that it *can* be copied for free, and so we *do*, because by and large we lack an understanding or knowledge of what property rights really mean. We're selfish, we benefit from the theft, and we lack the knowledge to prevent us from acting in that way, despite the fact it's not actually in our best interest or indeed ethical.
> Except this is 50 years ex post facto. If anyone can copy your table after 50, would that make you go
> back and uncreate it? I mean, after 50 years, if you haven't turned a profit on your first table, either
> by selling it or appreciating its exclusivity, you're not going to. I think we can count on two hands
> the number of songs that are still making money after 50 years.
It's still theft to take something which belongs to another person. I don't think it's right to argue taking something without permission is not theft is the item has no value. It is still a violation of that person's property rights.
> And most of the people who made them are dead.
Plenty of people live in houses which were made by people who are now dead.
If something has value, and it belongs to you, you can pass it down to your children, and it then rightfully belongs to them, and the theft is then against their property. The fact they didn't make the original item is irrelevant; it belongs to them.
> You make that sound as if it's a problem, but I'd guess that things would look much better if everybody
> who's just in it for the money quit making tables.
Let's say I'm not in it "for the money".
Let's say I make tables because I love working with wood.
Don't I *STILL* need to sell them for money?
How can I spend all day carving if I don't have any cash?
And if I spend all day carving, how else am I going to make money other than selling the things I make?
> So-- you're up for paying royalties for the use of Aristotle's works? Or Shakespeare's plays?
In fact, with regard to Shakespeare's plays, what happens is that the publishing company publishes the plays and makes a profit, but Shakespeare's descendents (to whom the plays rightfully belong) get nothing.
Shakespeare worked hard to make those plays; and despite handing them down to his family, his family gets nothing.
What would be wrong with a part of the money I spend buying a book of a play going to his family?
> If I carve a table, I have a beautiful table. If you make a copy of it somehow, I still have my table but
> so do you. I don't have anything less than I had before.
How do I recapture the time and money I spent making the table if other people make copies for free?
I cannot.
And since I cannot, I can't make the table in the first place, because I need to make money so I can feed myself and rent my flat and buy clothes.
I find it depressing that /. readership mods views they disagree with as flamebait and troll.
It should be clear from the post that I'm making a serious point, which means I'm not trolling or angling for a fight.
When debate - which inherently means the positing of disagreeing views - is modded as flamebait, you have ossified.
> You always can do with your ideas whatever you want: you can keep them in your head, you can publish them,
> you can tell your kids about them.
This is not true if copyright is taken away. You then cannot make money from your creations, because anyone else can make copies of them for free.
> You want something completely different: you want the power of the state to create a market place for
> you where there ordinarily wouldn't be one.
In what sense?
It seems to me if I create something, it belongs to *me*. If I invest time and money making a beautiful carved wooden table, it's *mine*. If I invest time and money making a beautiful song, it's *mine*. The fact that some of the things I make have *properties* which lend them admirably to being placed in the public domain is utterly irrelevent. Ownership of an creation is held by the person who created it, regardless of its properties.
So it seems to me I'm using the power of the State to prevent theft.
> The ironic thing about whiners like you is that if your rule were implemented, you wouldn't be able to
> create anything at all since inventors of basic ideas and creators of basic content are using license
> enforcement to restrict others from building new stuff.
Whereas if anything which *can* be copied for free is legally permitted to be copied for free, production of such things will almost cease. How can I make songs or films or software, when they cost me time and money, when I cannot recapture those costs?
> The ironic thing about whiners like you is that if your rule were implemented
and
> Or, to put it bluntly: your ethics are screwed up, and so are your economics.
If you need to attack me, you are insecure in your arguments.
> For the good of society.
Who decides what is good? what happens if what is decided as good is harmful to members of that society?
Wasn't segregation justified in this way?
> No it's not, since it doesn't deprive you of anything.
Of course it does; if anyone can make a copy of the item for free, how can you recapture the time and money you invested in creating it?
And given that, you would have to stop creating these things - since you can't feed and clothe yourself doing it - and change jobs.
If there's one single action which will devestate any industry, it's removing the ability to make money from that industry, because people working in that industry are then obliged to change professions - and that entire industry basically disappears overnight.
The fact you can copy something a zillion times with no effort doesn't make a difference to the ethics of ownership.
If I make a beautiful carved wooden table, then it's mine, I invested a lot of time and money to make it. It can't be copied - but so what? it's mine, and no less or more mine because of it.
If I make a beautiful song, then it's mine, I invested a lot of time and money to make it. It can be copied at no cost whatsoever - but so what? it's mine, and no less or more mine because of it.
The *properties* of an object make no difference to who it rightfully belongs to. The fact than an object has properties which might well make it absolutely easy to pass it widely into the public domain does not mean that it is ethically right to do so.
> Tangable property should be taxed on death (possibly up to 100%).
Wouldn't that mean that in a couple of generations, the State would basically own everything?
If you get the urge to examine your thoughts in this matter, I'd like to point you at Milton Friedman's book "Capitalism and Freedom". He describes how economic freedom (e.g. private property rights and ensuring economic power is kept out of the hands of State) is vital to political freedom. If you can read this and still think that 100% tax at death is the right idea, I'd be very interested to understand your view.
I could be wrong, but I think you've conflated property rights with the ethical imperative to help others.
If I make a song, and I decide to keep it in the family, I've not caused harm to others - either by my action or by my inaction.
If I invest a cure for a terrible disease and I keep it in the family, I've caused others harm by my inaction - by not offering them the cure when I could have done so.
I would agree that for some knowledge, there is an ethical imperative to share that knowledge, and I think this is the case when harm is prevented by sharing. However, it does not count as "harm" to prevent someone from listening to a song, seeing a film or having a copy of the latest Oracle database.
If I'm a painter, and I create a great work of art, does it pass into the public domain after n years?
If I'm a programmer, and I create a wonderful piece of software, does it pass into the public domain after n years?
If I'm a singer, and I create a great song, does it pass into the public domain after n years?
Oh. It does. Erm, why?
It's basically judicial theft.
The ethical rule is this; if you make something, it belongs to you, and you can do what you want with it - and that includes handing it down to your kids to help them in their lives.
So the questions have to be: if the results of this research are so amazing;
1. why aren't companies like Pfizer investing in it? (probably they are?)
2. why doesn't the US Government have the sense to invest directly in such things?
Do we really have so little influence over the State, and the State is so stupid, that our best hope is to encourage the State to invest indirectly in such research by funding military development and hoping we get the sort of spin-off we're looking for?
And even more significantly, have we ACCEPTED this state of affairs?
This is OUR money that's being spent.
QoS requires support from your network hardware.
The Internet doesn't have that.
Note also QoS doesn't actually solve all problems. For example, if you have two network applications running, and you want one of them to have priority such that it can take bandwidth from the other when it needs it - well, you're out of luck. QoS doesn't handle that situation.
> what happens if I put my lunch in front of a 300 megaelectronvolt beam?
Isn't that about the same a front beam laser?
> How do you choose without money? Education is expensive.
Education vouchers. Give people a bit of paper which says "this is 3000 dollars, but only when spent on education". You then let them spend it how they want.
> I've been re-reading that for about 10 minutes and I still can't figure out if you come from another planet or
> you just have a very weird sense of humour.
I've read your reply just once but I have no hope of figuring out what you disagree with *because you haven't said*.
People who are poor get quite a bit richer if they don't have to pay the tax they currently pay which supports the education system. They use that money - and perhaps vouchers from the State, to ensure a minimum funding for their children - and *PICK THEIR SCHOOL*, because the schools will be private. Right now their kids go to the catchment school, they have no choice, and their kids are *screwed*.
> The US has had a state-run education system for approximately 140 years. It seems that during this period quite
> a few brilliant scientists have been home grown.
I suspect that the rate of world-shaking scientists being produced isn't a particularly useful metric for measuring the performance of a national education system with millions of ordinary children and students.
And who is to say there wouldn't have been a lot more world-shaking scientists, had the people been able to pay for their own education and so *have* an education, unlike the current situation, where for example pretty much all poor downtown city dweller children are condemned to having no future whatsoever and so will never produce a world class scientist.
> which would mean an end to OLPC.
Good. Why are we giving 100 dollars in the shape of a laptop to children who don't have clean water?
> what you are describing is a world in which education in the sciences is the privilege of the economic elite.
That's the *current* world, where the elite go to Ivy League colleges because they pay privately and the poor are *forced* to send their children to the local hellhole schools where they are condemned to having no future whatsoever.
> what you are describing is a parochial eductation in which kids are never exposed to opposing points of view,
> never introduced to subjects or skills which are inherently difficult or expensive to teach.
In the UK, students take out loans to pay for their education. They pay them back once they're working. Some subjects costs more than others - and the student, if they paid fees, would pay more for those subjects than others. What's the problem? people would be paying for themselves, so they get to choose what they want to do and, quite rightly, since they can pay for it themselves, doing so. I'd also point out the difference in price between courses isn't that much; a normal course is about 11,000 a year (UKP), I think a medical course (most expensive) is about 20,000.
> the state-run education system works fine everywhere else, proving you wrong.
Actually, speaking for the UK, the education system stinks and is a political football. I believe there is a global refrain that students are being taught skills which are no use at all when they come to work.
In fact, in a more general sense, I think teaching as we know it is completely bunk. You learn what you *do*, and in classes, what you *do* is you *don't* ask questions, you *accept* what you're told, you *know* that the teacher knows all the answers and you don't.
"Teaching As A Subversive Activity", by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner.
What teaching needs to give us is a bombproof *crap detector*; the ability to *ask questions* and to have an idea which questions should be asked.
What teaching actually gives us is the exact opposite of this.
> Of course you can argue this, but it should be from a general ethical perspective (i.e. this isn't the state's
> job), rather than on the basis that state-funded education and research has failed.
I argue it from both of those basis'.
> Where was funding coming from in the days when the U.S. was the undisputed scientific leader (and expected to
> remain so)? While some private entities were involved, most of it was government.
Thing is, this in and of itself demostrates nothing. Perhaps the US would have been twice as far ahead if funding had been done differently. The US, post WW2, was by itself over half the world economy. Of *course* it was likely to lead research, whether or not it was (for example) half as efficient in research as it could have been.
> The problem right now is that the U.S. government is being stupid about how it involves itself with education
> and research (displaying bizarre priorities, and putting funding wherever the President, rather than the
> actual educators, thinks it should go).
From my view, this is one of the undesireable properties of centralization of any form; power becomes increasingly subject to fewer and fewer individuals and so more and more open to abuse. However, I think that State taxing and then funding is wrong both ethically and in terms of effectiveness, as well as possessing these other undesireable properties.
> Because we are not trying to let people become an inbred elite while other people suffer.
You're saying private education would lead to elitism?
In what way exactly is the current State run system NOT leading to elitism?
If you're poor and live in a city, you're screwed - your kids will go to the most appalling school ever.
If you're better off, you live in a nicer neighbour and get a half-decent school.
If you're rich, you're Ivy League.
Private education would permit the poor the send their kids to much better schools - because they could *choose* the school their kids went to. It wouldn't make any difference to the well-off, since they go private already.
> Pure research without obvious practical application seldom happens in the commercial sector - there are too many
> incentives to put the money elsewhere.
Widely repeated but I think untrue.
Think about say the big Japanese electronics firms, the big American industrial groups - they spend VAST amounts of money on fundamental R&D.