The latest Swarthmore College bulletin has a story about John Mather '68, who works for NASA's COBE project. COBE is a Cosmic Background Explorer satellite. Mather and his associates are searching for the origin of the universe. They have found evidence supporting the Big Bang Theory.
This project costs 300 million dollars. Mather justifies the cost in this statement:
"It's a uniquely human opportunity. I certainly don't want to live in a world where everyone says, 'Well, it's just too expensive to have an adventure, so we're all just going to sit home.' Try to picture an ideal world where everyone is clothed and fed, where no one is poor or suffering. What would we do then? Well, we'd want to do what we're doing now. It seems to me if we pretend we have to wait until some other problem is solved first, then we're never going to get anywhere. We have to take on the challenges we see when we see them."
My first question: Who is going to cloth and feed the people in the world? Someone has to produce goods and make money. Among these people are the taxpayers who contributed to the COBE project. I am sure they would rather feed and cloth themselves and their families with the money they earn instead of spending it on a project that has no practical applications.
And if the poor's tax money is going to pay for anything, it should pay to support the proper role of government: to protect individual rights. The poor would appreciate an increased police force to protect their lives and private property from being violated. The poor do not earn much money to begin with. The government, by protecting, should assure that they can live off the products of their own minds.
But it is not. In the case of the COBE project, the government is using the product of people's minds for a project with no practical applications. The COBE project will not benefit the taxpayer at all. The poor are hurting themselves by paying taxes. Their money will not feed or cloth them, nor will it protect the good the already have.
Again, the proper role of government is to protect people's rights. This includes property rights. Why? Man must survive through the use of his own mind, and to do that, he must have free disposal of the products created by it, i.e., private property. Only an individual can think. Thinking leads to the production of wealth, and hence property belonging to its creator. Groups of people do not have a common, public, mind, hence, there is no public property.
Such is the meaning of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These rights of action are a necessity for a human being to live in a society. They are rights entail a negative obligation upon others, i.e., others people may not infringe upon an individual's pursuit of happiness as long as this pursuit involves only people who choose to be affected by it. In other words, one's pursuit of happiness may not interfere with another without consent.
In a free market economy, it is to one's advantage to engage in relationships with other producers. Living in a society benefits all productive individuals because they can trade the wealth they create for the wealth others create. People have different skills, and hence create different goods. Relationships must be mutual, and involve the consent of all parties involved. Without the right to dispose of the product of one's mind as he pleases, man does not have a right to his own mind. His mind belongs to whoever controls where its products go. In the case of the COBE project's $300 million cost, the tax payer's minds belong to the government, and more specifically, John Mather and his associates.
NASA scientists admit that there is no practical application for the COBE research. Mather replies: "But, for what we got, it seems like a bargain."
A bargain, Mr. Mather? A bargain is when one values the goods received in a transaction much more than the goods given. The poor and suffering taxpayers of the United States would not consider the COBE project a bargain. You consider it a bargain because you value the COBE project more than most people and you are not poor or suffering.
An ideal world does not involve unchosen non-mutual sacrificial relationships. The one you proposed does. All people do not value the COBE project equally. The poor and suffering people of this country sacrificed their earnings to fund the COBE project. They sacrificed sustaining their lives with money they earned for a luxury project. And through taxation, the government forced them to do it. A progressive tax system does not solve that problem either, since one's income is not the only determining factor of how much one would value the COBE project. No sacrifices exist in an ideal society. An ideal society involves people disposing the products of their work to attain values that improve their lives. The free market economy allows for this.
In a free market economy, you would not have to wait until no one in the world was poor or suffering to pursue one of your values. The law would not compel you to withold spend your earnings on wants until everyone in the world had basic needs, regardless of whether they paid for them. The morality of altruism, and the economy based on it, socialism, requires such sacrifice. Under socialism, someone's gives him a right to the products of another's mind. Socialism entails that people's minds belong to the most needy, whether their needs are rational or not. Socialism makes indentured servents out of producers and their owners are the non-producing needy.
So how would you raise the money for your project if you and the government could not force people to pay for it without their consent? In a free market economy, you would be able to find people who value such information. [If the COBE project had any practical application, these people would be called investors] They would voluntarily contribute a portion of their wealth to your project according to how much they value it. The poor and suffering probably would not contribute much. People paying for your project value the information it yields. And guess what? If a poor and suffering person wants to know about the origins of the universe, he can go to a bookstore and buy a book about it with money he earned.