Trump, The Luddite – Latest Observations, Edition 1.0

Donald Trump is bringing on a Kennedy to advise the new administration on the dangers of vaccines. Here come the conspiratorialists and propagandists. The March of the Peabrains. The Cavalcade of [mental] Shorts. Who needs logic when you have no facts?

After all, you can’t trust science. The conservative Right claims science as the Agitprop of the Left establishment. Must be true. It’s on Facebook.

Get ready to cringe as Alchemy comes to Treasury to improve the gold reserve. The Advanced Research Projects Agency has already been asked to create ten Philosopher’s Stones.

All you online gamers: we’ve finally had an administration that plays like an MMORPG. Archer Daniels Midland to be replaced by Farmville; SPAWAR, by Halo. Department of Defense by Mobile Strike. Medicine has been brought to communication surgically limiting larynxes to utter a mere 140 characters. Words end mysteriously mid-syllable.

The Space Program and NASA are still in play; we are still not sure if the manned extravaganza is going to displace critical data. What is more important? Inspiration or information?

All we can do is hope that this does not pass on to real science. The best way to fund science is never to be beholden to the government. Seek to support science from industry, philanthropy, charitable organizations, and educational institutions. Bureaucracies make for bad science due to rulemaking by partisans. These myrmidons, be they left or right, do not thoughtfully write original policy but rather, soldierlike, carry out with utmost cruelty to the enemies of current administration rules that hurt.

Ultimately, the injured are the middle class and poor. The wealthy can usually afford increase costs. Developers often can afford to raise home prices, to a point, but the market will still cost them sales. Rules are a drag on the economy and cost everyone, even funds for science research.

Congress under Obama was impotent against a leftist agenda. We are now visiting the Antipodes under the Trump presidency. Science will be stuck with a conservative agenda. Unfortunately, the modern conservative economic plan is not free market trending more to the Keynes of Richard Nixon. Where Trump wishes to spend on infrastructure as did his predecessor, the nation needs less strangling and more loosening. The appliers of Latin Squares and Bayesian analysis must find paths that are market-oriented while the government continues to follow the Yellow Brick Road to find a Wizard that left Oz at the Great Crash. Free markets are the only way to prosperity and the only way that science will ever find a permanent source of funding in a moribund economy.

But this is just an initial observation made in the New Year. The time will come to reassess the Trump science agenda.

Source: Science Via Markets

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