North Carolina recently offered Boeing $683 million in tax incentives to open a plant in North Carolina to build Boeing’s new 777X jetliner. The NC bid failed, as did those from some other states, when Boeing decided to build the 777X in its home state of Washington where there is no state, personal, or corporate income tax.
EcPoFi recaps last year’s development of the True Money Supply (TMS), a monetary aggregate developed by Murray Rothbard and myself in the 1980s.
Legal recreational cannabis/marijuana/pot is almost one year old in Colorado. The Denver Business Journal recently published a retrospective containing several articles reviewing the experience. The general conclusion is that it has been a big success, not the tragedy some had predicted or claimed.
One by-product of the Paris terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo was an outpouring of support for freedom of speech. While there was general agreement that the magazine’s content has been, beyond a doubt, offensive to some (and not only Muslims), almost everyone agreed that freedom of speech is a fundamental right that should be protected, regardless of who is offended by the speech.
9. What Should Government Do To Encourage Scientific Research and Development?
What, then, should the government do, if anything, to encourage research and development? We have repeatedly outlined the recommended principles of government policy: to avoid interfering positively in the free market or in scientific inquiry, and confine itself to changing the provisions of its own rules and laws that hamper free scientific research. The latter category, however, leaves room for far more government action than one might think.
Some of the recommended policies which flow from these basic principles have already been outlined:
10. Automation
In all of the problems discussed above, the charge has been that free market activity was deficient in some form of scientific research of development. In the question of automation, the charge is really the reverse: that technological improvement might become so great as to threaten dire consequences, particularly unemployment.
Epilogue: The Values of Technology
There is a wing of opinion, here and abroad, that is positively opposed to modern technology and all it stands for, believing that mode and technology brutalizes man, enslaves and “depersonalizes” him, ruins his culture, etc.63
7. Atomic Energy
We have so far omitted discussion of atomic energy. Our nuclear age has been held up as the chief argument of those who believe that government control and direction of science is necessary in the modern world—at the very least, in the atomic field. The government-directed team effort involved in making the atomic bomb has been glorified as the model to be imitated by science in the years ahead. But, in analyzing this common view, Jewkes, Sawers, and Stillerman point out, first, that the fundamental atomic discoveries had been made by academic scientists working with simple equipment.
8. Basic Research
The National Science Foundation, in its 1957 study of American research and development, concluded that “our overall effort is ample.”53 It also concluded, however, that we are deficient in basic research, and that this phase of R&D needs encouragement. It recommends a program of Federal encouragement, ranging from tax exemptions (see below) to Federal aid.
