*OT Rant on Monopolies and State Research* SM, thanks for the word from MIT Orthogonality Team on the peace dividend. The real issue is monopoly power. Microsoft is criticized as a monopoly. The USA government total spend must be over 30% of the GDP of the USA. If all those government services were cancelled, there would be a huge acceleration of The New Paradigm and improvement in the standard of living of citizens. Not that that would be practical, but a lot could be.
Some government services are useful, but the monopoly aspect of it costs a fortune. Microsoft as a monopoly is trivially insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Not accepting for a moment that Microsoft has anything other than a normal commercial monopoly.
Military security is necessary, but that doesn't mean an open checkbook is necessary. It's a bit like airport crash fire services. They have cost many billions and saved almost nobody. Vaccinations or cancer R&D would have saved millions.
It's interesting that people who support military R&D as a good source of commercially useful things wouldn't support communism or slavery, but confiscated money is the same as confiscated lives [as anyone who has spent their life trying to get money can testify]. USSR used to confiscate the efforts of the population for military research and collective good [which didn't seem to be much good].
Even if the efficiency of the confiscation was proven doesn't make it moral. Suppose the collective could develop really good things after a decade or two of R&D, useful to both military defence and commercial activity. It is unreasonable to confiscate the property and lives of people now who will never see a benefit from the confiscation. Maybe those people would rather drive a nice car than invest in new technology. That should be up to them, not for politicians to take their money because the politicians have some pals who will do some research. Stealing the money and giving it to universities to waste is not much better than giving it to military R&D.
Slavery was bad back then and it is still bad. People should not be treated as sheep to be shorn for 'the greater good' which really means for the benefit of academics and military club members.
Sure, the internet started from a military project. It would have been invented by now anyway. Perhaps it would have been better if left to free people to organize. Maybe, for a start, there wouldn't be the silly address system, techstocks.com which is such a hassle to type. What's wrong with W.techstocks.com as the full address?
Sure, some military activity is valuable, but that doesn't mean it all is.
Mqurice
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