[cmc31]

(stolen money should not be spent in more or less important things, it should be returned to their rightful owner so they can choose what to do with what they've earned)

Just to be clear.. Your issue is not that money from taxes is spent on scientific research and space exploration, but really that you have to pay taxes?

[innguest]

My issue is, whoever wants to accomplish something that takes a lot of money to make happen, should do like ARKYD and make a kickstarter or any other peaceful alternative, that allows for every individual to choose whether they'd like to participate.

My issue is that running to the government, just because it already has guns in place pointing to every individual's head in case they don't pay, and saying "we'll steal just 20 more cents but really it's nothing! it's so little! just let us have these 20 cents so we can do this for you, folks. for you!".

C'mon, if it's for our benefit, then convince us of it, lead by example, and ask for money peacefully without using the extortion machine of the government.

[zackmorris]

This is a misconception. In totalitarian countries, yes, the government can do whatever it wants and extort money, labor and other favors from the people by sheer force. But in the US, we control the government (we can get into notions like tyranny of the majority or regulatory capture, but for the most part the government is very limited in what it can and can’t do or else the people go on strike). In other words, the US government is the largest union (in the labor sense) in the history of the world. We all pay our dues in the form of taxes and get rather remarkable protections, such as a military industrial complex larger then the next dozen or so countries combined and a level of trade that lets the vast majority of the population veg out on reality TV.

I may personally agree with libertarians that the current system is far from ideal. But where we critically disagree is that a private system would ever come anywhere close to the level of civilization we currently enjoy. If you read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, almost nowhere do they talk about economics (other than taxation without representation etc). That’s because a wild west style free market is the most basic form of trade above barter. We see it everywhere, from third world villages trading with one another, to banana republics, to the startup community. It doesn’t need a specific mention, just as we don’t need to bother saying the Earth is round or gravity exists.

The free market is the basis of economies, just as evolution is the basis of the laws of our universe.

So trying to place it above things like human rights or progress in things like public health or education is just bizarre. The idea that we’ll stop paying taxes and turn every road into a toll road, charge tuition for public school, or fight the bad guys with our own handguns when they come surging over the border is.. sophomoric. And what really sucks is the more libertarian a stance the population takes, the more we see concentrated wealth and power undermine the public good, as we just witnessed in the midterm election. Why would we elect people to office whose campaign slogan is that government is bad? That’s like hiring an undertaker as your doctor. Yet we see it over and over, to the point where ideology is given equal weight to pragmatism.

So to get to the point of why paying taxes for government space exploration is a good thing: because if we didn’t, we would be paying the entirety of our incomes as debt service to a central private bank that spends the money suppressing us (the end result of global fascism). We lucked out that a slight majority of the founding fathers were more in favor of government by the people (wherever that may lead) and were willing to fight and die for that rather than fall back to the default position of oligarchy that previous governments had used for thousands of years. Yet here we are again, where wealth inequality from free market policies has reached such a degree that the scales might tip back to a government that only serves the financial elite.

[ameister14]

We live in a Republic, in the United States at least. As a result, you have elected certain people to represent you. Basically, you have given your proxy to someone. NASA, or any other organization, then goes to the person you've given your proxy vote to, and convinces them and leads by example, asking for money peacefully.

The person votes for it, and by extension YOU vote for it. Nobody's stealing anything; you voted to give it to them.

[Cthulhu_]

Unless you abstained from voting, in which case you don't get to complain either.

[bennyg]

It's not 20 more cents... It's actually less money over time. I feel like this argument is really working against you rather than in your favor.

Extreme libertarianism is awesome in theory, but fails hard in reality. Income tax, when used smartly, can be one of the greatest things a nation has at its disposal.

[innguest]

> Income tax, when used smartly, can be one of the greatest things a nation has at its disposal.

A nation is just its people. People are already in possession of this money before the income tax takes it from them. I agree that this money can be one of the greatest things that people have at their disposal, which is why I'm arguing we should not let government handle it.

Why are you against peacefully convincing people, making your case, asking for money, and then using that money for what you want? Don't we see time again with kickstarter that this works? Why do you cling to old economic ideas of redistribution of wealth to fund space programs which are supposed to be forward-thinking and future-looking? You don't think the future is decentralized, including the funding of big projects? Wow.

[tim333]

>People are already in possession of this money...I'm arguing we should not let government handle it.

a) That's what elections for. Start a party to abolish taxes and see if any people vote for you

b) HN isn't really the place for political ranting - there are other forums

[mtbcoder]

Crowd-funded projects fail all the time. What do you do when your local police or fire department fail to meet their crowd-funding goals? How do you handle those that donate very little or nothing at all but consume large amounts, if not most, of the services/resources? How would an individual possibly have the time to adequately research and figure out what to crowd-fund? How would you stop outside interest groups from manipulating what gets crowd-funded? The list goes on.

[scentoni]

This actually happens in some unfortunate places: "Firefighters in rural Tennessee let a home burn to the ground last week because the homeowner hadn't paid a $75 fee." http://www.nbcnews.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/t/no-pay-...

[bennyg]

> You don't think the future is decentralized, including the funding of big projects? Wow.

Nowhere did I say that. I think there is room for both. You seem to think there isn't.

[kartikkumar]

This is slowly but surely happening, with platforms like Experiment.com [1]. The main issue that I've seen so far is that campaigns that center around raising funds to pay a scientist's salary don't seem to be working. Whether that's a case of providing better explanations as to why the money is well spent, or whether it's a culture issue, I'm not sure.

End of next year I'm going to have to job hunt again and I'm thinking of trying to crowdfund a postdoc position.

So in short, I think the transition to more crowdfunded science will happen, but as with many things that change the foundation of how science is done, it's a gradual process.

[1] https://experiment.com/

[TomGullen]

Serious question, why don't you move to a country that has a tax system that you agree more with? No one is stopping you, it would be a free market victory.

I do actually think you have a bit of a point. It would probably be more ethical to spend the space exploration money in other areas. However, there is much lower hanging fruit for things to cut out before we reach space exploration (warmongering and defence budgets for example)

[innguest]

Serious answer: I moved here to the US because this is supposed to be the Land of the Free. No other country has such an amazing legal foundation to allow for Liberty; the founding fathers came here exactly because they wanted to move to a place that had a tax system they agree with more. But in the past few generations we've destroyed this.

So it's not I that have to move somewhere else. I've already moved. I've moved to where there can be Freedom, and where there once was. I'm here because I believe in Freedom and I think we can get it back, no thanks to people like you that are OK with the erosion of this most Enlightened idea.

The real question is, those who don't believe in freedom anymore, why don't they move to Europe or something? That's what Europe has always been, so go there. People came here from Europe so they could be free, and you're spoiling it for us. This is a land of immigrants that want to be left alone. If you're not that, then at least don't complain, and it would also be nice to stop silencing those that still think this is a good idea.

To your other points, what you mentioned aren't the lower fruits, those are the most high up fruits. Lower fruits are things that can more easily be decoupled from the scope of the government. ARKYD and similar projects prove there's no need for government in sending things to space, plus all the work by Virgin and Space X. So this is a low hanging fruit and people need to understand we need to decouple this from the government purview. Defense is super hard to decouple, requiring the whole population to be armed as you have in Switzerland.

[TomGullen]

> The real question is, those who don't believe in freedom anymore, why don't they move to Europe or something? That's what Europe has always been, so go there. People came here from Europe so they could be free, and you're spoiling it for us

I am there!

> This is a land of immigrants that want to be left alone. If you're not that, then at least don't complain

You mean the native Americans?

[TomGullen]

Serious question, why don't you move to a country that has a tax system that you agree more with? No one is stopping you, it would be a free market victory.