Science, Technology, and Government — Summary

Rothbard’s 1959 monograph responds to post-Sputnik calls for state-directed science by denying that research can be exempted from ordinary economic reasoning. Scientists, laboratories, instruments, and funds are scarce; to assign more of them to “science” is to withdraw them from alternative uses. The policy question is therefore not whether science is valuable, but what quantity and direction of research society should support.

The crucial question, then, is: how much?

For Rothbard, that question cannot be answered rationally by exhortation, prestige, or emergency rhetoric. It requires prices, wages, profits, losses, and consumer demand—the signals through which voluntary exchange ranks competing uses of scarce resources. Once science is removed from the market, allocation does not become more enlightened; it becomes political.

There is one and only one alternative to voluntary directions under a free price system: and that is government dictation.

This principle structures his distinction between civilian and military research. Civilian science, he argues, should be left to universities, foundations, firms, independent inventors, and voluntary patrons. Military research may be purchased by the state insofar as defense is treated as a governmental function, but even there Rothbard favors private contracting over bureaucratic production. Government should act as buyer, not as scientific planner, and should avoid building permanent research hierarchies insulated from market tests.

His discussion of scientific manpower applies the same logic to claims of shortage. A “shortage” has economic meaning only in relation to price. If scientists and engineers are genuinely scarce, their compensation should rise relative to other occupations; absent that evidence, political complaints about insufficient manpower are suspect.

If then, there is a shortage of scientists, market salaries for scientists will significantly rise, relative to other occupations.

Drawing on Blank and Stigler, Rothbard argues that the evidence did not justify panic over a national deficit of scientists. Where recruitment problems did appear, he traces them largely to government policies themselves: civil-service pay ceilings, restrictions on contractor salaries, secrecy rules, security investigations, and bureaucratic constraints that made defense work less attractive. The remedy is not a larger state science program, but the removal of state-created impediments.

The book’s account of invention similarly rejects the belief that modern science requires centralized planning. Using Jewkes, Sawers, and Stillerman, Rothbard emphasizes independent inventors, small firms, universities, accidents, and dispersed experimentation. Discovery cannot be administered like routine production because its route is unknown until it occurs.

The essential feature of innovation is that the path to it is not known beforehand.

This epistemological claim underwrites his critique of official research programs. Committees, reports, hierarchies, and national priorities tend to reward safe, visible, politically defensible projects while discouraging eccentric or uncertain inquiry. What planners call duplication may, in Rothbard’s view, be a necessary feature of decentralized testing, rivalry, and discovery.

Soviet science functions as his cautionary example. Sputnik, he contends, did not prove the superiority of planning; it was an engineering and propaganda success, not a refutation of market calculation. Lysenkoism is more revealing because it shows political authority corrupting scientific truth. Atomic energy receives a parallel treatment: the wartime state accelerated the bomb, but the decisive theoretical foundations emerged earlier from universities, foundations, and comparatively free inquiry.

The policy chapters convert this analysis into a deregulatory program: rely on private contractors for military research, pay market wages, reduce secrecy and security burdens, loosen atomic controls, reform public education, and remove barriers to private capital. Rothbard also distinguishes subsidies from tax exemptions. Subsidies politicize allocation by transferring resources to favored projects, whereas tax reductions leave resources under private control.

The chapter on automation extends the argument to technological change generally. Rothbard treats fears of permanent technological unemployment as a recurring fallacy. Machines displace particular jobs but increase productivity, wages, leisure, and living standards over time. The epilogue broadens the defense of technology, presenting scientific progress not as dehumanizing but as a precondition for wider comfort, education, art, and personal development.