Picking up from the end of this thread.
[Quote=Sam Stone]
A better example would be the PC industry, which has developed with almost no government direction at all. Today we have iPads, and portable phones more powerful than desktop computers of just a few years ago.
[/quote]
“The US government created the entire IC market by requiring second sourcing of components for military contracts.”
Mind if I don’t take your word for that and ask for a cite?
What is the IC market?
Integrated circuit.
RE: computers, it sounds like you are saying that the military created demand for a product, which spurred the creation of a whole industry. Mind explaining how that is contrary to libertarian thought or makes Sam Stone’s statement a “libertarian myth”? Libertarians don’t deny that governments buy stuff, and some stuff may be purchased largely by governments (e.g., road signs).
Disprove it. Show me the major purchaser of ICs that wasn’t government backed. Show me the manufacturer who wouldn’t have fought copying of their products. Show me a reason any manufacturer would have made the investment in R&D based solely on the public market.
Thanks.
I’m saying the government provided the demand for products which allowed them to be produced at the low prices required for public demand. It also created the infrastructure which is at the heart of all demand for popular products. I’m a real small-l libertarian, not a big-L anarchist. And I believe in liberty which has never been available to any but a handful of individuals without government.
(and to John Mace also, I’m trying to make this a more exciting debate than one about scientific definitions).
Allow me to help TriPolar out on that.
Here’s some text from Integrated circuit - Wikipedia
SSI circuits were crucial to early aerospace projects, and vice-versa. Both the Minuteman missile and Apollo program needed lightweight digital computers for their inertial guidance systems; the Apollo guidance computer led and motivated the integrated-circuit technology,[11] while the Minuteman missile forced it into mass-production. The Minuteman missile program and various other Navy programs accounted for the total $4 million integrated circuit market in 1962, and by 1968, U.S. Government space and defense spending still accounted for 37% of the $312 million total production. The demand by the U.S. Government supported the nascent integrated circuit market until costs fell enough to allow firms to penetrate the industrial and eventually the consumer markets. The average price per integrated circuit dropped from $50.00 in 1962 to $2.33 in 1968.[12]
I don’t think this particular history of IC chip growth is absolutely key to his position because the IC itself is a very fundamental and broadly applicable type of technology. “Fundamental” like the “printing press”, or “electricity”.
Yes, the first major body of work to be printed was the Bible but does that mean that religion is what allowed books to be cheap today? The utility of the “printed word” is so fundamentally and universally necessary that if it wasn’t the Bible, a million other applications would have required the reproducible benefits of Gutenberg’s device.
Likewise, because the telegraph and lighting were the first customers of electricity, it doesn’t mean we should look in awe at Western Union and Edison light bulbs. There a millions of uses for electricity that would have attracted tons of geniuses to bring its costs down.
Last, the 4 million in the wiki article needs to be put in perspective of inflation adjusted numbers. That works out to be about $29 million in today’s dollars. That should lessen the impact of saying the “entire IC market.” Warren Buffet and many venture capitalists would laugh at such tiny numbers; they’ve got bigger deals to chase.
Because the inventors created it before the government bought high quantities of it. They had intellectual curiosity, and saw a need. They don’t wake up out of bed one day and say, “gee, I think I’m going to build stuff for the government!”
No. The entire world demanded the capabilities of the IC chip. The predictive applications of the chip were quite obvious because it was a miniaturization of transistors and the whole world already knew the power of hooking up a bunch of transistors. The government happened to be an early customer but that’s an accident of history and not a requirement for technological progress.
I’d probably go so far as to say that the government (mostly DARPA) accelerated the creation and adoption of ICs. The early transistor and IC computers were not cost effective for businesses but were necessary for weapons programs (IIR for ICBMs and jet fighters/interceptors). Many of the innovations for what turned into the PC originated in DARPA projects.
Without DARPA I’m sure we’d have computers today. Maybe we’d be a few years behind or maybe computers would look different but we’d still have them.
It’s possible to pick some examples when government involvement was a boon (and I think computers is a positive example). But that needs to be balanced with all the times that government involvement led to a boondoggle. I don’t think that libertarians would say that government can never do the right thing (if they do then I disagree) but that overall they hurt more than they help.
To be a little clearer (and more boring), the computer industry and its offshoots would exist without the government regulation and investment, but it would not have advanced at the pace that it did, and it would not have made the investment in the manufacturing technology to produce the volume required for low cost. That’s why the manufacturers were in favor of the government regulations, as they are with all government regulations which provide them profits.
Scientific research is one field that would suffer severely in Libertaria. People can talk all they want about the technological breakthroughs that have come about through private sector developement, but more often than not the research that led to said breakthroughs has piggybacked on publicly-funded research that came before. Industry-funded research has one motivator - that libertarian god profit. But basic research, the what, where & why of a thing are rarely profitable questions and are of little interest to a profit-oriented private developer.
For example…I know a man, a highly-regarded nematologist. Kind of a crackpot. His life’s work is the study of tiny soil-dwelling critters that most people have never heard of. His one claim to fame is the discovery & identification of two types of nematode no one proviously knew about. (One is even named after him…a very big deal to him and the three or four other research nematologists in the world). He works for a university, and a good deal of his funding comes from federal grants. He doesn’t make money for anyone. But when his research is published, it is used by such private entities as Monsanto and Dow to develope chemicals to combat nematodes and increase the efficiency and productivity of farmers and enhance the world’s food supply.
Dr. H---- has never turned a profit in his work, and it is doubtful that any private-sector company would have subsidized his work all these years. In Libertaria the work probably wouldn’t have been done at all. But in the big picture, probably millions have profited indirectly from it. Including many of those who think government is a waster of money.
SS
Unless of course it leads to patents. The current patent system in the U.S. is closest to the end-results of libertarianism anyway that its proponents may as well declare it Libertopia. I.e. a theoretically egalitarian system under which the rich blithely disregard their own infringements and tie them down in a crippled court system forever.
You’ve been a member 4 years and you’re saying other people have to disprove your assertions in GD? No, grasshopper. That’s not how it works.
I can say whatever I want. I’m not forcing you to answer. But you could also present an opposing point of view.
At this point, the prima facie evidence has been provided, do you have any contrary evidence?
Wouldn’t all those bureaucrats at the patent office be out looking for private-sector jobs under a libertarian administration?
According to the wikipedia article, the US military was the first major “market” for ICs. Since the title of your thread is “Libertarian Mythology”, let me disabuse you of the myth that Libertaria would not have a military. It most certainly would. If there’s one thing that virtually all Libertarians agree on, it’s that funding a military is a legitimate function of any government. A similar market would have been there for a superpower such as the US.
Besides, other markets would have opened up if the military wasn’t there. Technology always starts out very expensive, and the rides the cost curve down as new markets open up and economies of scale are achieved.
Unless all other countries are also Libertaria-like, they will have the smarts to support their own industries over ours through subsidies and tariffs, cutting off most foreign trade. As far as Libertaria having an army is concerned, how big will it be, and will it still support the massive amount of research it has done before and still does now?
Why would non-libertarian countries cut off foreign trade? We don’t do that now, and no country is Libertaria.
It won’t be big, but it will be smart. It would be unlikely to support as much research as we do now. But there is no evidence that we are doing the “right” amount of research now. If more is better, then you can never do enough, and we’re currently falling behind where we should be.
In reality, we have no way of determining what the “right” amount of government subsidized research is. If our enemies are developing nuclear weapons, then it’s certainly a legitimate government expense to develop our own. But if it’s just a matter of us having flat screen TVs and better video games… not so much.
If it’s smart to cut off foreign trade, why don’t more countries try it?