A lifelong family friend brought up the subject of government-funded science at a family cookout recently, and was surprised to hear my opposition to it.
“Well, I don’t think we should be taxing people to study the sex life of quails on cocaine,” I responded jokingly.
As best as I can remember, the conversation that followed with this brilliant woman in her 50s—who in younger days was just a dissertation away from a PhD in chemistry—went along these lines:
“That’s just the problem. You don’t know the incredible benefit of all this research. Even the quail study has a scientific basis that can be used productively.”
“They’re wasting so much money. That’s the difference between government and the private sector; the private sector is the one that brings actual productive benefits, because they insist on results.”
“The government’s shotgun method of research is best; it’s better than the rifle approach of industry, which wouldn’t fund enough research anyway. Can you give me even one example of a scientific advance funded by the private sector?”
“Jonas Salk inventing the polio vaccine.”
“That’s the most recent example you have?”
“No, you asked for an example and I gave you the first one that came to mind. How about the iPhone?”
“The iPhone is built on top of government research.”
“Maybe, but government didn’t make the iPhone; it’s private industry that made it practical and useful.”
“This is the problem. Do you know what an amino-acid spectrometer is?”
I may have recalled the wrong kind of spectrometer she described here. And she didn’t mean her response to be as insulting as it objectively was. The upshot of the unspoken argument was basically, “Those Trumptards are uneducated and don’t understand science, which is why they want to cut government funding of it.” But she knew I wasn’t a Donald Trump supporter. ...
Her “spectrometer” argument didn’t sit right with me at the time, and after a little thought, I realized why. The argument “it’s worth it,” if it’s not a metaphysical argument, is an economic argument and not a scientific one. Yes, it had the patina of a scientific argument, but there was no actual science in that argument.
She had blinded me with “science.”
But the argument was even worse than that, as she had used the “shotgun” argument over the “rifle” approach, essentially arguing that in order to be efficient you have to be inefficient. At bottom, her argument could be reduced to: “I haven’t done any math or any science on this topic, but government science money helps. Trust me, bro, it helps!” ...
The U.S. government even has generated numbers they use to measure whether the impact of regulations are worth it, to judge whether a regulation will save lives or cost lives, economically speaking. The number varies from department to department. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services used the number $13.1 million in 2024. The New York Times reported in 2020 that “Today, the [Consumer Product Safety Commission] uses a figure of $8.7 million. Other U.S. departments’ and agencies’ values differ somewhat. The Environmental Protection Agency uses $7.4 million. The Department of Transportation (which includes the Federal Aviation Administration) uses $9.6 million.” Peer-reviewed scientific journals generally run a spectrum for the “monetary value of a statistical life” that’s lower than the HHS number, with a median midpoint of $5.7 million in 2019 dollars.
If only Anthony Fauci had used one of these numbers before trying to shut down the entire $21.4 trillion U.S. economy in 2020 in the name of “science,” Americans would never have suffered from the shutdowns and all the negative consequences of that shutdown (which included a mental health crisis, a heightened obesity crisis and higher cancer deaths).
Even using the higher $13.1 million figure, that would mean the $195.7 billion in federal research funding is costing nearly 15,000 lives every year. So federal science research better be saving at least 15,000 lives on net every year, or it’s not worth it, economically speaking. And no, I won’t trust you on it, bro.
Let the advocates of government-funded scientific research try to demonstrate with credible numbers that, on net—even after the Food Pyramid, COVID gain-of-function research in Wuhan, AZT disaster, and the COVID shutdown—this funding saves more than 15,000 lives every year and increases our net wealth. From my perspective, they’re starting several tens of millions of lives and a rounding error from $200 billion per year in the hole.
Yes, indeed! They just do not want to use economic statistics and numbers when they try to pull their arguments from authority on us. Arguments from authority are a non-logical way to get around the facts and associations of facts and premises by just saying, "The Authorities Say So, So It Is!" THEY have been doing this to us forever and a lot of us knew it, didn't we? Did you point it out to THEM? It cuts their arguments off at the knees, immediately. Don't let them, whoever they may be, get away with using this trick in an debate.