Private Capital Quotes
The vast majority of public funding for science is decided upon by peer review by scientists themselves. The government officials do not make most of the decisions. They rely on panels of scientists. The reason some of Venter’s early ideas were not funded was that the majority of scientists did not think Venter’s research was a good bet. Venter however is one of those scientists whose ideas have been very unorthodox and his great strength is that he does attack problems in unusual ways and he has had a number of major scientific breakthroughs. Venter is very persuasive and has found it easier to convince businessmen to fund him than the scientists who sit on the government science panels. However, American government money has funded many of the major breakthrough’s of our society including, manufacturing with interchangeable parts, railroads, the telegraph, computers, atomic energy, and the Internet.
Mises defines government revenue in such a manner that it always relly belonged to individuals, therefore when government invests in enterprises that accumulate capital via profits, Mises does not consider it capital accumulation. One counterexample of this point is the George Washington Bridge in New York, built in Mises lifetime by Robert Moses of the New York Port Authority. The tolls on the bridge paid off the bondholders who financed much of the initial construction. But then capital started to accumulate at such a rapid rate that Moses was able to build other capital projects ranging from highways to the World Trade Center Buildings with capital constantly accumulated. The New York Port Authority under Moses generated more capital appreciation than any corporation that had been in existence at that point. And he could not even sell stock. However, the Port Authority and a few others were exceptions. Generally government did was unable to accumulate capital in its enterprises.
This is a particularly important quotation. The American Socialists were very clear as to what Socialism was and what it was not. One of the favorite and successful tactics of Conservatives in America was to label any reform that they were opposed to as Socialist or Communist during the Red Scare. 100 years after this was published, the same technique was used. When Barack Obama was elected President, the Republican opposition to most of his reforms almost always began with the accusation that the reform was Socialist and many of the conservatives called Obama himself a Socialist. They had head the term applied to anything progressive for so long that they didn’t really know what Socialism was. This quotation makes it very clear. The “Night Riders” were the KKK and others who would lynch, murder and torture Blacks. The favorite claim of Southern segregationists was that any attempt at ending segregation was Socialist or Communist. That worked until the passage of the 1963 Civil Rights Act.
