Capitalist Science

purely governmental? Really? Property rights exist wherever people successfully claim stuff and are willing to defend their claim. Even dogs have property rights (and help us have them!). The idea of property is a social construct, not a government one. When it comes to land, the government role started by setting up a system where people could register the pre-existing territorial claims they'd made under the local customs, thereby making it easier to arbitrate disputes. But you don't need government to do either of those functions. (Neither running a registry nor arbitrating a dispute requires a monopoly of force, so both of those can be done privately. And have been, and sometimes still are.)

It actually does have an incentive to be internally honest, that is, to speak honestly within the corporate entity doing the research. If it isn't honest, it won't work, and what doesn't work can't be monetized (to a first approximation, anyhow; I can come up with crazy exceptions too, but they really are the exceptions). It does have an incentive to be externally dishonest and/or externally silent.

Public research, by contrast, appears to have no particular incentive to be honest either internally or externally. And lo, there's been a whole slew of problems lately about the problems that the largely public research community is facing with honesty, reproducability, and the skewed incentives around publication.

Personally, I think the only defensible position is that both approaches have shown to have serious problems with incentives, and the idea that public researchers are above corruption and have no negative incentives and are just generally "better" than private ones is a point of view that can't stand up to five minutes serious examination. And contrary to naive beliefs about the incorruptibility of politicians controlling the public research funds, both systems have a serious problem with needing to flatter the opinions of the one with the purse strings and make sure not to disprove them too hard. Very, very serious problems.

Congratulations on that cheap blow suggesting there's something childish and immature about understanding history, government and law.

> With or without government to enforce your rights, you can make it hard for people to take stuff away - and even in a government based system we expect you to do that to some degree. You can lock stuff up - put it behind walls and gates. You can guard it yourself. You can get a dog. You can ask or pay other people to guard it. You can install streaming security cameras to help identify miscreants. You can pay private patrols.

You do realize that this means only the rich and powerful can defend their property, right? You create a system of might makes right, with the rich and powerful as substitute government. And if you lack the power to defend your property from those more powerful than you, you need the protection form someone who does, which leads to feudalism. Feudalism can certainly work, but it's not preferable to the rule of law, with justice for rich and poor alike.

Nope, I don't realize that at all. It's a common objection made by people who don't understand how private legal systems work and have never looked into it. You'd know better if you had read the books I recommended above.

There is no way to perfectly defend property - "utopia is not an option" - but you can raise the cost to the criminal in various ways. The cheapest is by buying a lock. Even very poor people can and do have locks on their doors or bars on their windows. Another cheap option is to organize a volunteer community watch program. A little more expensive but still quite doable is for any GROUP of people to form a neighborhood association which hires a guard for the neighborhood - this has often been done by a local merchant's association. The poor currently pay a rather large amount of money for "protection" in the form of police salaries paid via sales tax and property tax - but they don't GET protection for their money! The government-run police primarily serve the interests of the rich and powerful and their own interests - they don't do much to protect the poor. In a private system you get what you pay for and pay for what you get - people who hired police protection would actually GET police protection.

> You create a system of might makes right

Nope. In fact, putting government in charge is a system of might makes right, one prone to terrible abuses. Decentralizing power makes it less prone to abuse. I'm talking about actual rule of law, which does protect the rich and poor alike.

> And if you lack the power to defend your property from those more powerful than you, you need the protection form someone who does, which leads to feudalism

Here's another option: Consider that by social convention when you aggress against me I have a claim against you for damages. Suppose I can sell that claim. If I can afford to prosecute you directly I do so; if not, I sell my claim against you to someone who is more powerful. But selling a claim is an ordinary business transaction - it doesn't give the buyer any special power over the seller.

(BTW, wikipedia says "There is no broadly accepted modern definition of feudalism". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism#Definition )

Tell you what. If you just want to read a SINGLE CHAPTER of MoF that most clearly addresses your concerns, it is quite short, it is titled "POLICE, COURTS, AND LAWS---ON THE MARKET", and it can be read online here:

http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Libertarian/Machinery_of_Freed...