That they make the decisions is entirely my point. Even when the politicians are removed from the equation the tax payers are never included in it. That's taxation without representation. That's authoritarianism.

The military spends its research money on scientists, and why bother talking to politicians about it? They haven't got the clearance to find out, much less the inclination to tell the tax payers specifically what it's being spent on.

I understand that. The author is resurrecting the Demarcation Problem. A demarcation is impossible, because any time you try to say that all red things are false and all yellow things are true you will be faced with things that are orange - half-true. And then there's bias. One man's red is another man's orange.

The author skipped right past the authoritarianism of science. The eager willingness to glom onto the state for money, and in return over half of the research science money is spent on the military, and the lion's share of what's left is directed toward the aims of the corporations which can best exploit the results…