lol with the formatting, not sure what happened there :P
Excellent job connecting the unit with the "Invisible hand", a term that wasn't uttered once in the last month! And you are completely right! The conservatives (the ones who have the military preferred view you cited) have this fetish with military spending so they can pulverize other nations and act as the "tough guy" while behind their backs our OWN people are withering away.
I wish it were as easy as spending in the right places, and maybe this IS the most practical way of doing things in our current situation. But I think overall we need a reassessment of what our biggest enemy is: sickness (and not the spending fetish kind, the physical and sometimes mental (which was surprisingly hardly discussed at all this unit... parenthesis in parenthesis ftw...) kind). People are acting as if money is all what has kept us advancing in science... when it's really only ALLOWING us to continue (because money has "stuff" value)- the KNOWLEDGE has been with us all along. If it weren't for corruption and research was free to do... we probably would be much further along.
Great post to cap off an awesome blog for this unit!
Evan
I'm still the only one to comment?? Well that's unfortunate :P
ReplyDeleteyes!
ReplyDeletelol maybe we should remind Eloise... she hasn't commented on mine either...
ReplyDeleteI'm interested in the idea of "free research," CS. Are you thinking that the government would subsidize research? From what I understand, a lot of research is paid for by private institutions like colleges and pharmaceutical companies.
ReplyDeleteOf course, the latter are very happy to push research forward because it implies many more patents and products for them to sell. But as you've noted, this has also led to corruption, price-gouging, and the suppression of competing ideas in the past. Would you say, then, that self-interest should be removed from the equation?