Legally, it is breach of contract, breach of patent, or breach of
copyright case.
The problem is that a company cannot fund a high initial cost, low
incremental cost product unless it charges average rather than
incremental cost in its pricing. There is no other way. That means a
company must use a government's policing power to prevent competition.
Monsanto must fund its own research by selling at a higher than
competitive, free market price.
After all, if farmers could plant seeds they had grown, their
incremental cost would go down and Monsanto would not be able to sell
to farmers seeds that the farmers themselves grew.
The only way to fund high initial cost research and development, and
still sell seeds at a competitive, free market price, is to fund
research and development separately from the selling.
That means that initial funding must come from somewhere other than
the company. Other funding sources are to be encouraged, but as a
practical matter, only governments can extract large sums.
However, as Douglass C. North said in `Institutions, Institutional
Change, and Economic Performance', in
... a world of uncertainty, no one knows the correct answer to the
problems we confront ...
This means that you cannot have a single government committee decide
how to do the funding.
The committee will fail. It will make mistakes. You need only to
look at the fate of the former Soviet Union to see what single funding
does. Or committee or agency will be `captured' by those who
profit from its funding decisions
As a practical matter, you cannot even have a half dozen committees.
After all, it is worth millions to companies to influence them. You
need more.
The solution is at hand. I have talked about it. It means funding
through many different committees. You need enough different funding
agencies, with enough different people in them, that they cannot all
be captured or all make the same mistakes.
It means supporting multiple efforts, many of which will fail, just as
many companies go bankrupt. It also means favoring competitive, free
markets.
Although a smart society will encourage other funding mechanisms, like
the `March of Dimes' in the 1930s and 1940s, as far as I can see, the
only funder that drags in enough money is a government. (And I do not
mean a government like Bolivia, which brings in a very small portion
of GDP; I mean a government like those in western Europe.)
Spending should be mostly by colleges, universities, and similar
organizations; funding decisions by hundreds of committees.
All very awkward.
This proposal is very unpopular, both in centrally planned states like
the communist ones and in states with oligarchic companies. In such
countries, the powers that be rightly recognize that they would lose
power if this proposal were adopted.
--
Robert J. Chassell
[EMAIL PROTECTED] GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8
http://www.rattlesnake.com http://www.teak.cc
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