but WE do spend money on CERN, which means that someone values it. However, it is incredibly likely that in the case of CERN, it is a politically connected elite that is making those choices on behalf of us. In the case of something like CERN, the end result is arguably benign, but consider, what else might we be spending our money on? Might it be cheaper to make the same discoveries that CERN makes 50 years from now instead, with better and more efficient underlying technologies? What are the consequences of giving politically connected people disproportionate purchasing power?