The world’s largest steel maker.

CORNING
Display Technologies.

Japan’s largest advertising firm.

Voted “most innovative” pharmaceutical company in Fortune‘s 2003 and 2004 rankings.

The US packaged foods giant.

Giant U.S. Pharmaceutical.

Leading provider of objective analysis and effective solutions.

One of the world’s leading providers of outsourcing and IT services.

Europe’s leader in corrugated packaging.

Germany’s global powerhouse in electrical engineering and electronics.

Texas Department of Transportation.

The most complete source for integrated information and technology applications in the global financial services industry.

The No. 1 Internet brand globally.

External Links: RAND – Wikipedia on RAND

The achievements of RAND stem from its development of systems analysis. Important contributions are claimed in space systems and the United States’ space program, in computing and in artificial intelligence. RAND researchers developed many of the principles that were used to build the Internet. Numerous analytical techniques were invented at RAND, including dynamic programming, game theory, the Delphi method, linear programming, systems analysis, and exploratory modeling. RAND also pioneered the development and use of wargaming. Current areas of expertise include: child policy, civil and criminal justice, education, environment and energy, health, international policy, labor markets, national security, infrastructure, energy, environment, corporate governance, economic development, intelligence policy, long-range planning, crisis management and disaster preparation, population and regional studies, science and technology, social welfare, terrorism, arts policy, and transportation. RAND designed and conducted one of the largest and most important studies of health insurance. The RAND Health Insurance Experiment, funded by the then-U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, established an insurance corporation to compare demand for health services with their cost to the patient. According to the 2005 annual report, “about one-half of RAND’s research involves national security issues.”

(((A competitor of NewsFutures has for client a very big non-profit organization.)))

Me: Yes, this is one of the deepest worries with ideas like futarchy or legislation-linked markets. The latter have a libertarian slant insofar as they mitigate the state’s ability to redistribute wealth, but if they were actually widely used, these effects might be canceled-out — or worse. Maybe the state and its taxing/spending would balloon as it would be more tolerable given the recourse of hedging against it.

Patri: Well, we’ve already seen taxing/spending balloon because its tolerable. I think that’s the greatest cause of the difference in tax rates between the 19th and 20th centuries. We are so rich that the half our money the government takes isn’t worth that much to us. In the old days, people rioted over tiny taxes that meant a lot more to their standard of living.

There is no easy way to ensure against this danger, but its existence might actually make tax futures more attractive to those on the economic left. It is a “package deal” as Tyler Cowen says, using one of Rand’s favorite colloqualisms. Cowen’s bottom line is that, “human beings have deeply rooted impulses to take newly acquired wealth and spend some of it on more government and especially on transfer payments. Let’s deal with that.”

Yes, let’s, literally.