Actually it's a lot more likely you'd be dead without taxes, since we need (a) Tons of cash to finance anti-aging research in the first place and (b) Enough cash personally available to us to be able to afford the treatments when they arrive.

Really I admire your zeal for the anti-aging cause but the Libertarain stuff just isn't helping the cause.

The vast majority of people most educated in economics (i.e academic economists) don't support Libertarian economic views. Read Robin Hanson's post on the 'Overcoming Bias' blog (Future of Humanity Institute):

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2006/11/the_cause_of_is.html#more

3:1 economists are liberal. As I pointed out in the comments section:

Robin,

... the liberal dominance "...might be due to academics being more intelligent and informed"

The fact is that liberal positions are overwhelming the dominant academic view-point even among economists ;) It's not as if economics is a new field. It's a mature field with plenty of data. It seems hard to believe that (for example) there's some sort of systematic bias magically rendering 75% of all economists the inability to think straight (3:1 ratio of liberals to others in economics). Therefore a priori the suspicion of irrationality must fall on the dissenters (the non liberals).

Posted by: Marc_Geddes | November 27, 2006 at 11:24 PM

In his reply Hanson concedes the point:

Marc, yes, if all we knew was that academics tended to favor a position, after correcting for any obvious self-interest, then we would think that view more likely than not to be correct. Knowing that the issue is a social one weakens the effect, but the effect is still there.

Posted by: Robin Hanson | November 27, 2006 at 11:30 PM

The 'Scientific American' article says it all really:

http://sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=31&articleID=000AF3D5-6DC9-152E-A9F183414B7F0000

[Posted by: Marc_Geddes at December 26, 2006 9:56 PM]

Marc: I believe you have a point regarding taxes, and I also believe that the putative link between death and taxes was somewhat specious, more to take advantage of the old Franklin quote than anything else. However, I think you might want to be careful about generalizing from the tenuous death-taxes link to your more general point about libertarianism. In particular, I'm thinking not of the tax burden but of the regulatory burden, the latter of which definitely throws obstacles in the path of potentially visionary research. Libertarianism is more directly opposed to intrusive government regulation than either conventional conservative or liberal orthodoxy. I don't see a particularly obvious link between progressive taxation or redistributionist spending and stunted research efforts, but the link is clearly there between the regulatory hurdles and the protraction of product development times. Considering that many new products build on previous ones, these delays compound over the years into decades of potentially wasted time--a resources that may, for millions of people, be more precious and scarce than mere cash.

[Posted by: Gramarye at December 28, 2006 3:37 PM]