U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators

Don't put words in my mouth. I have never said that people being harmed and killed is acceptable. My disagreement is about whether government regulations, on net, actually result in fewer people being harmed and killed, or more. That's a factual disagreement, not a disagreement about values. If I believed, factually, that government regulations actually did result in fewer people being harmed, on net, I would be in favor of them, no matter what libertarian beliefs I might have in the abstract. But my factual belief is the opposite.

To the extent it's true that being "bad for business" is no longer enough of a disincentive for corporations, as I've already said, one key reason is that the corporations have bought regulations that favor them and disfavor potential competitors.

It's true that that's not the only factor involved. Corporate governance is broken. A big part of that is also government regulation, which does to some extent prevent outright fraud (for example, the S&L debacle in the 1980s), but is perfectly fine with other practices, like golden parachutes for executives and corporate takeovers in which the buyer gets the assets but offloads the liabilities on the taxpayers, that do just as much damage, if not more. All of these things are regulated--but the regulations don't stop harm from being done.

There is one other factor that works against corporate governance which is not, in itself, a product of government regulation: the fact that most share ownership now is not individual stockholders but mutual funds. That means most people don't even know what corporations they own even small pieces of. But mutual funds are a big advantage for most people investing for their retirement, because they're an obvious hedge against risk, so they would exist even in a true free market without any government regulation. The problem is that, as far as the individual corporations are concerned, their time horizon is now much shorter. The mutual fund has to care about providing returns over a long time horizon, because it's holding people's retirement accounts, which might not be drawn on for decades. But the corporations only see short term trades being made, many of them by those same mutual funds, trying to increase their returns. So corporations have to focus much more on short term returns instead of long term planning.

That would be one area where a government ought to be able to improve things, because a government's time horizon ought to be long-term. But it isn't. Government's time horizon is the next election. So even in this area, governments are actually worse than corporations.

I chose a black American specifically because they are as closely identified with America as any other group. The natives were here before them, but they don't have the same relationship with the state or the abstract national project.

Saudi Arabia is a bizarre choice because it isn't exactly a research powerhouse. America might be ahead, but China is the clear runner up and is catching up thanks to what might as well be an intentional effort to undermine American science.

Are we purposefully dumbing down the country now?

Sure, some things are trade-secrets or national security issues or whatnot, but those are already not shared.

More than militarily the US has always led with soft-power (science, culture, etc). We are throwing all this soft-power away.

Perhaps there is a legitimate reason, but like so many things in this administration this feels like a knee-jerk reaction to... Something.

Why would you assume this isn't their goal?

The primary system means that nobody with any principles is left in the Republican Party, unfortunately.

But not all is lost. Many are very eager for the reins of power to come back and for laws to be enforced. Sure, the Trump regime may tell itself that it's immune from tax audits ever again, but that's not legal and as soon as the force of law is back there are many eager attorneys with high principles that will be hired back into the DoJ and enforce the law.

We saw this after Nixon's lawlessness too. Those who abetted Nixon in breaking the law were disbarred.

Prosecutions will come. Trumps's key mistake is thinking that his popularity doesn't matter anymore. It does. It means that people with morals and ethics can legally gain power and legally enforce the law.

If Trump was at 60% popularity, I would be singing a different tune. But at 35% popularity and 60% unfavorable, there is appetite left in our democracy to remain a democracy and to go after the crooks. Even if a good 30% of that unfavorable opinion is just about people's own pocketbooks rather than the principles of law and democracy, that's enough for those who care to actually enforce law.

Be concerned, but be ready tk supppprt those who will correct the course of our ship.