>Value can be measured in the real world, it's not that hard, either people want it and are willing to SPEND on it, and thus you can have profit and you can measure efficiency or people don't want it and then there is NO VALUE except for what is in your head.
That's an economist's definition of value - it's not an accurate or complete picture. Knowing the movements of the planets is information we cannot use to make a product, we cannot sell it, we cannot make anything out of it, if we ever can it won't be for probably hundreds of years - yet it DOES have value.
Any and ALL knowledge have value. In fact, the value of it is INFINITE since knowledge cannot be used-up. It's a true post-scarcity supply.
Economists measure that value as "zero" - but that's because economists are using a too limited view.
>If you are not seeing this, then all you are talking about is mental masturbation, sure sure, you can have your mental masturbation, you can have your mental orgasm even because you believe that you have some knowledge that wasn't there previously, but if this knowledge never translates into anything that the economy actually is willing to pay for with profits, then its purely irrelevant, it was no more relevant than any other form of entertainment.
That kind of view is the antithesis of human progress. All knowledge has infinite value just by existing.
>My argument is that the basic science is done in the private sector as long as there is no government stealing money from the private sector, and it's done as a side effect of people searching for profit.
If we limit science to that which has the potential for profit (or at least the currently VISIBLE potential for profit) we destroy it, not least because it isn't science AT ALL unless the results are freely available. It's only science WHEN it is public domain, until then - it's not science.
Fundamental principle of the scientific method is peer-review, public scrutiny and openness - directly contradictory with a profit motive.
>Before 1913 there were no income taxes, there were no corporate taxes, there were no payroll taxes, there were no capital gains taxes, no taxes on dividends, no taxes on rent, no taxes on PRODUCTIVITY
Not only an idiot, an idiot who thinks America is the world. Read the bible, the first version of income taxes will be found the very first chapter of Kings I. 4000 years ago the governments charged taxes. Most of the Industrial-age scientific revolution came from Britain, not America and that WAS a welfare state. Most scientists were not employed by industry but by the church or by TAX-FUNDED academia (which Britain had, had for hundreds of years by then). The idea of tax-funded academic research was already WELL ESTABLISHED when it gave us Isaac Newton in the 1600's !
>But how necessary is it to have government stealing money from the private sector to fund research into such things, what is the efficiency of this model?
It takes something of fixed/limited value to buy something of infinite value that only gets MORE valuable the bigger the supply becomes and MORE valuable the more people have access to it. It's the greatest deal in the world, the ultimate investment.
>It is the institutions that are concerned with education that allow the environment to develop that is necessary to do scientific research, including basic sciences.
Cause and effect reversed - AGAIN. It's institutions that are concerned with research that double as the best training grounds for other researchers. That should be the total extent of university education: training the next generation of scientists. Everybody who does not WANT to be a scientist should NOT get a degree, but go to some or other form of trade school.
>You are completely wrong, putting the cart ahead of a horse, thinking that the education and science came before the free market capitalist looking for profit.
The first example of a University was Plato's academy, established in 387BC, it charged no admissi
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