The budget of the National Science Foundation is going to double over the next five years.

Bummer. I don't see why people think that socialized science works better than socialized medicine, socialized education or socialized charity. Although, of course, we can look at the job NASA has done over the last couple of decades to restore the faith...

There are worse places the money could be going (admittedly, there are better places also, like paying down the debt, or back in the taxpayers' wallets).

I look at government funding of science in the same way that the ad industry looks at ads. About half of it's worthwhile, but there's no way to tell which half.

I can see the ad campaign promoting the NSF's budget hike:

"What other federal program can honestly say it's worth every other penny?"

I have to respectfully disagree with you there, Old Guy. Socialized medicine doesn't work because in any free economic system, there will be a market for medicine that will drive the medical profession to deliver a better quality of care than the government can.

The problem is that for a good deal of the scientific research out there, there's no direct market for it. Sometimes that means it's somebody's worthless pet project, but sometimes it means it's just basic research in an area where we don't know enough to start talking about practical applications yet. In a situation like that, where not enough is known about an area for the private sector to take a chance on picking it up, it's "socialized science"...or nothing, in many cases. There are some private scientific philanthropies, but not enough.

This one's a tough call, especially since so much of it is contingent on future events -- not many budgetary projections 5 years out hold up. I also encourage us all to delve more deeply into the proposal to see which fields get the most money.
I'm not crazy about Big Science, either, but in the real world, the consequences of letting someone else, perhaps anyone else, get ahead of the US in "blue-sky" research could be very bad indeed, for all of humanity.

You mean like the way the Europeans got ahead of us in cell phones? Was there no basic research involved there? Or like we needed federal funding to discover the transistor and the integrated circut? Or map the human genome?

I think that the reason we don't have more private funding of research is because it's funded by the government, creating a huge discentive to spend your own money (but the fact that people do it anyway shows how powerful the urge is).

Stepping away from facts to opinion, I believe that the private sector (both commercial and charitable) would step up to the plate. I think that there'd be less research without federal funding, but I think what remained would be overall more productive because of greater diversity and drive. For example, do you really want to argue that we'd be further behind in space transport if we hadn't been funding NASA for the last couple decades? Government funded research is a "single point of failure" system - if it works, it's more efficient but if it goes wrong you lose big and there's no good way to recover.

Finally, I've been in grad school, I've been involved in the processing of getting grants for "research". It was the most faddish thing I've ever done, which is not what you want for basic research.

Please remember the distinction between an "authorization" bill and an "appropriations" bill. The bill doubling funding for the NSF is of the first kind.