We should oppose the concentration of power in any one person’s hands
On my very first day in medical school, the dean gave a lecture on serendipity and scientific discovery, highlighting Penicillin as the most famous example of a scientist stumbling upon a discovery he hadn’t originally intended to make.
Serendipity requires an environment with the freedom to think outside the box and to innovate without excessive central control. When science is made rigidly uniform by placing power in ‘omniscient men,’ the fortuitous finds of individual scientists may be left undiscovered.
The classical liberal economist Friedrich Hayek foresaw this debate when he wrote: “Most scientists realize that we cannot plan the advance of knowledge, that in the voyage into the unknown—which is what research is—we are in great measure dependent on the vagaries of individual genius and of circumstance, and that scientific advance, like a new idea that will spring up in a single mind, will be the result of a combination of conceptions, habits, and circumstances brought to one person by society, the result as much of lucky accidents as of systematic effort.”
In other words, the benefits of scientific progress are only realized if science is free from excessive restraint.
The same arguments against central planning for an economy also hold for science. If, or rather when, the central planner errs the entire economy is threatened. Likewise, when a central medical planner errs, all patients are threatened.
I do oppose it, for all the good it does!
i’ve said since day one. we deposed a king and fought a revolution over one man issuing edits to us and how we must live! fjb, fauci and any other ahole on this planet that thinks they are gonna tell me or my family what I/we need to do in order to continue to pursue life liberty and happiness!
This government is so corrupt and evil! The elites and bankers may think they’ve bought it. But they didnt pay us/me for it! Wait until I/we decide I/we want our pound of flesh!
Semper fi!