[ExI] Judging radical possibilities

[Stefano Vaj]

On 26 September 2011 01:00, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:

> Public funding is not literally taken at the point of a gun, in almost all
> cases.  For one, there aren't enough guns.  If everyone stopped paying
> taxes, it would be impossible to collect enough taxes to force everyone
> to pay.  The system only works because most people willingly go along
> with it.
>

Yes, but this is a kind or not-unraveling, metastable situation. The outlaw
is keeping forty hostages, they could easily overwhelm him, but none is
especially willing to accept his or her very high probability of taking a
bullet by moving first. So, I would not read too much into it in terms of
mainstream happiness about being amongst those who pay taxes.

OTOH, I am pretty positive that while breakthroughs do not escape classic
economics in its broadest sense, they are never ever the product of
strictly-construed (as in "monetary returns") market mechanisms. In fact,
there are convincing theorisations that seem to demonstrate that this has
never been the case in the past, and is not likely to be in the future.

See La recherche et la technologie, enjeux de
puissance<http://www.amazon.fr/recherche-technologie-enjeux-puissance/dp/2717845933/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1317031409&sr=8-1>
de
Valérie Mérindol, David-W Versailles et Patrice Cardot.

-- 
Stefano Vaj
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20110926/6ff01645/attachment.html>