I haven’t argued against that in any way. My comments about the IC market were a direct response to Sam Stone’s post.
Tripolar, if you ever decide to make an argument for any position, I may argue against it. So far you have only repeatedly asserted.
ETA: And now we apparently have a new assertion–that libertarians want other people to pay for the military. What does that even mean?
Oh no. American liberty, whether the L is capitalized or not, is NOT the liberty of the common man to infringe on the property rights of the rich(*). Police and regulatory power for that will only increase in their Utopia. If you’re looking for the money savings in libertarian government, that comes from removed support for the non-property rights of the common man: no money for public beaches, parks and forests; no welfare; relieving businesses of onerous employee safety standards; etc.
(* - One of them will chirp in to inform us that the property rights of the poor are also protected in Libertarianism 
Like Marie “Let them eat cake” Antoinette, that the poor lack property seems not to occur to them!)
If you deduce from this train of thought that real-world Libertarianism is not so different from the Fascism of, say, Pinochet’s Chile, congratulations! You probably now understand Libertarianism better than these so-called “Libertarians” do.
My response to this argument specifically: if the taxes that fund this research were lower, then Monsanto et al would have more money to invest in this kind of research. If the benefits were not enough to pay for the research, the research would not, in general, get done. The money would be spent on different research, or on something else, or taken as profit by the shareholders.
So you have the government taxing businesses and deciding what is good research to do. Some of that research may benefit some of those businesses; I think it’s fair to say that much of it benefits nobody except the researchers and bureaucrats. That money is, for all intents and purposes, wasted. If the money had been left with the companies rather than taxed away, they would at least had the opportunity of funding research that was immediately helpful to themselves, and reaping the rewards therefrom.
I agree with Deeg:
[QUOTE=Deeg]
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.
[/QUOTE]
Roddy
I’m not sure what you’re looking for here. It’s not about a principle. I’m tired of hearing Libertarian utopian theories of minimalist government. The PC industry was not developed with almost no government direction. Libertarian principles of liability in the aircraft industry have driven up the cost of airflight from small private planes to airlines. The Light-Sport and Experimental aircraft costs have remained low because of government regulation. Libertarian stories of government free success stories are largely fiction.
If you can’t refute my assertions there isn’t much to argue about, with me.
I made no such assertion. I asserted that Libertarians want other people to pay for the military. That was a minimal assertion, because my observation is that most Libertarians want others to pay for everything else they benefit from.
I think this thread just jumped the shark.
I didn’t say “A”. I said “A”.
I didn’t say ‘a’. I said 'A". There’s a difference.
Good luck with your thread.
Pick a position, and make an argument for that position. If you don’t understand the difference between an argument and an assertion, then perhaps GD isn’t the forum for you.
Libertarians trot out that Hong Kong is a success story. Care to expound exactly on why since the post WW2 HK has been dominated by an unholy alliance of the government, property developers and cartels for most necessities?
The PC industry is a classic counter example of Libertarianism. IBM dominated the computer industry for years. They bundled software and hardware together which made it difficult for anyone else to gain a foothold. The govt forced them to unbundle so that customers of IBM mainframe compatible machines could buy the OS from IBM and the hardware from companies like Amdahl. When IBM developed the PC they followed this unbundled model and let Microsoft sell DOS. This enabled development of IBM PC compatibles from companies like Compaq, and later Gateway and Dell. Having a single software environment across multiple vendors’ computers allowed the PC software business to develop. Things would have been much different if spreadsheets and other software had to be written for each vendors’ unique operating system.
Of course there is also the internet developed by ARPA (now DARPA) and the algorithms used by Google came out of DARPA sponsored research.
The military is not an ordinary market; it is used as a way to informally subsidize companies. Defence contracts also are handed out with political motivations. This is not a controversial position. Boeing serves as an example for both phenomena: see The Economist. This would not be such an indictment of your position, except that in the previous thread, you argued that 19th Century America was not economically libertarian because of the government’s favours to companies.
Allow me to object to this particular point. Comparative advantage makes free trade the optimal strategy in most situations; and as for beggar-thy-neighbour problems, the international relations strategies to overcome those problems don’t have any one-to-one relationship to domestic economic strategies. (ETA: Note that this doesn’t make me pro-libertarian by any means; it’s just that this isn’t one of libertarianism’s many faults.)
Actually, now that I give it some more thought, I think your (John Mace’s) position has a deeper problem. If government’s aren’t competent as actors for the public interest, what makes them any better at being consumers for the public interest? Especially when they, just by being enormous and specialized, can end up creating all or almost all of the demand for a technology?
You are free to disagree with my assertions. My position is that they are true. But I started this thread to avoid hijacking another. If you have a topic you really want to argue about, start your own thread. If you want to argue in this one, find some way to counter my assertions. I don’t have to do the work for you.
What a ridiculous OP. First, Libertarians don’t oppose a military of whatever size is required to defend the nation. They don’t oppose the necessary taxes to pay for it. Therefore, if the IC market was created due to the needs of the military, that market would still exist in libertaria.
Second, by ‘government direction’ we’re talking about needing a government to direct and fund the research. i.e. a Manhattan project or other government laboratories, or the direction of research being controlled by government against some plan. In the other thread, examples of that were given (Japan’s Fifth Generation Project, France’s Minitel).
Those programs were started under the premise that the free market wasn’t sufficient, that government direction of efforts under a unified plan would reduce waste and lead to faster, better technology. In the case of Minitel, it was done to circumvent the perceived chicken-and-egg problem which was described as a failure of the market: Consumers wouldn’t buy terminals until there were good services, and businesses wouldn’t spend money to create services until everyone had a terminal. So the government of France thought it could use government to break the logjam by providing terminals and services to everyone. As it turned out, the market was doing fine, and the government of France eventually wound up hurting the public by trying to do ‘better’.
In the case of the integrated circuit, this didn’t happen. There was no government IC plan that directed research. There was simply a market for very small electronics, and the free market provided it. But clearly miniaturization of electronics was a huge market anyway - the military demand may have caused more capital to be injected into R&D because the profit was more substantial or more defined, but it would have happened regardless of military demand.
But once again, since Libertarians agree that a military is needed, this is a completely moot point anyway.
You do realize that most homebuilt aircraft are built from kits that are already 49% assembled by a factory, don’t you?
The homebuilt industry DOES fall under product liability laws, and homebuilt companies can be and have been sued (Rotary Air Force is one that pops immediately to mind). It was already mentioned that Burt Rutan stopped selling plans for the LongEZ due to liability worries. The standards for filing suit are exactly the same as they are for any other product - if you can show that injury was caused by faulty design, poor manufacture of the kit materials, or fraudulent claims, then you can sue the kit manufacturer. And people have done so.
Probably the main protection the kit manufacturers have had is that most of them are still relatively small companies, and liability lawyers like to go after companies that have deep pockets. Successfully suing Van’s for $100 million won’t get you that money - it will get you the assets of a bankrupt small aircraft parts manufacturer.
In any event, blaming product liability issues on libertarianism (libertarians think problems should still be settled in court, therefore the U.S. product liability system is an example of libertarian failure) is not warranted either. The problems of the U.S. tort system are unique and technical and have nothing to do with the debate between libertarianism and big government. You’ll find the same debates over what product liability laws should look like between libertarians as between anyone else.
Really? How did they do that? Are you saying that LSA aircraft are exempt from product liability? I don’t know of any liability differences for Light Sport aircraft, but maybe you do? Please provide a cite for your assertion.
The big difference between light sport aircraft and other factory aircraft is that under the LSA, the FAA allows manufacturers and the industry in general to self-certify. The manufacturer only needs to provide a statement of compliance to accepted industry production and testing standards. This was very specifically done because everyone recognized that the regulatory burden was too high to allow the manufacture of inexpensive personal sport aircraft.
In addition, a new pilot license category for LSA was created that also removed some of the regulatory burden from pilots. For example, no official FAA medical is required - a driver’s license is sufficient for proof of medical eligibility.
In other words, government over-regulation was a problem, and the industry was de-regulated, and the deregulation of that industry caused it to flourish. There is no question about this - the cause and effect is clear. Cheap factory-built aircraft did not exist until the regulatory burden on manufacturers and pilots was lifted, then the market exploded in size.
Firstly research in and itself is never useless if it increases our knowledge. Secondly how do you intend to know ahead of time whether research will be helpful or not? There are many examples of innovation born out research that are an accident rather than something planned.
If that’s the case, why do you need government to do it? If you’re just doing random research hoping for serendipitous results, why not just leave it to the market? The only argument left in this case is that only government does research. That’s clearly not true, in fact, private R&D dwarfs government R&D.
These arguments just baffle me. If you look around at the major innovations we have, almost all of them are creations of the free market. Can you walk back the history and find some point at which government touched the market? Of course. It’s almost impossible not to given the size of government. But to turn that into a claim that these things wouldn’t exist without government is just ridiculous.
There are examples of things that would not exist without government. I’ve already mentioned them: The Large Hadron Collider, The Apollo missions, probes to other planets, the Hubble. These are basic research projects that cost billions but for which no market exists. There’s a legitimate debate here about what would happen to programs like this in a libertarian world. Integrated circuits and the internet do not fall into this category. There’s no identifiable market failure that prevented these things from being developed privately, and there’s plenty of evidence that they would have been.
But why don’t we look at the ways in which government actually inhibits research? I already gave the example of the private aircraft industry, which was stagnanting under an extreme regulatory burden. There were a few dozen small aircraft type certificates, and they’ve basically been changing hands for decades because it was too expensive to certify new aircraft. In the meantime, the homebuilt industry was pioneering composite construction, small glass cockpits, different engines and airframe designs, and construction methods.
Don’t you think there’s something wrong with an industry in which a homebuilder in his garage can build an airplane that is measurably better than an certified light aircraft in every possible way, at 1/5 the cost? The reason was that homebuilders were free to try new things, to experiment with different designs, to learn from each other.
Then the LSA category opened up the same kind of freedom from regulation for established aircraft manufacturers, and what do you know, they started innovating too. The LSA category now has dozens of new aircraft designs using modern materials like composite construction and modern engines like the Rotax 912. Most of them are available for $50,000 - $120,000. Before this category came along, all you could buy in the same category was a Cessna 152, Grumman AA1, or a couple of other two -seat designs. They were all slowly, more fuel hungry, and much more expensive than the new airplanes. When the Cessna 1
I wonder what kinds of aircraft we’d have today if the industry hadn’t been shackled by overly zealous government regulations for 30 years?
Another good example would be pharmaceuticals. Government regulation has driven the cost of certification of a new drug to over a billion dollars, and the time to certify to more than a decade. As a result, the cost of drugs has skyrocketed, and research into drugs that have a limited market of rare conditions has dried up. Manufacturers are increasingly focusing on drugs like Viagra or Propecia which appeal to wide swaths of the population. The drug industry is dominated by a handful of giant corporations, because no one else can afford to thread the regulatory needle.
Where did I say that?
But Libertarians argue that we don’t have a free market, so these innovations occurred in an environment with government intervention. Let’s look at some major innovations that have radically changed the world:
The Internet - research sponsored by ARPA
Google - research sponsored by DARPA
GPS - done for the military
Google Earth - based on technology developed for military spy satellites
Jet engines - developed for the military
RADAR- military
Then there are the clusters of research and high tech that surround Universities, which public or private, have govt supported research. Intel, and Apple, and DEC, and Google, and Facebook all started in those areas.
In contrast, Walmart started in Bumfuckville, AS. Those conservative states with little govt regulation are also home to insurance scammers, health supplement companies, time share operators, and all sorts of other low life companies.
Bell Labs was in an environment of a govt enforced monopoly, now that that is gone Bell Labs is barely relevant. But in its day they developed the transistor, information theory, Unix, and other technology that forms the high tech backbone.
I don’t argue for socialism, but a good public/private partnership has been proven to be very successful.
So yes, the govt screwed over IBM by making them unbundle, but that led to Microsoft. Now the govt is making sure that Microsoft is not dominant so that the next company can come along. Meanwhile IBM and Microsoft are doing just fine.
You fail to make the distinction between fundamental research and * applied* research. Fundamental research need not have any practical goal in mind and is difficult if not impossible to plan or direct. It’s results are often random and unpredictable. But it has great importance, because it forms the knowledge base on which applied research is built.
Applied research, on the other hand aims at a specific objective, e.g. the developement of a new product, process or material. This has, or can have a direct benefit (profit) to the developer, and is the type of research engaged in by the large majority of private entities.
.
I don’t mean to devolve this thread into an argument over research methods or who should by rights be doing research. But you are incorrect in your judgement that fundamental research is pointless and without merit. The basic fallacy of libertarianism is in the assumption that only those things that turn a profit or accrue some direct benefit to an individual have value. The matter fundamental vs. applied research is one example. Fundamental research may show no direct return, and hence is unlikely to be engaged in to any extent by private interests, but it can be shown to have immense value as a general base for more directed applied research.
Just as “the market”, that demigod of libertarianism, is incapable of sustaining fundamental research, so too it diminishes or ignores such important social functions as public welfare, public safety and environmental protection. In Libertopia, these things would be ignored or left to the good offices and generosity of individuals. This is another libertarian fallacy - that assumption of individual altruism. To be sure, individuals can and do act altruistically on occassion. But individual self-interest usually dictates that objectivism trumps altruism.
Libertarianism is, at it’s core, a supremely greedy and selfish philosophy. It assigns a monetary value to everything and ignores or waves away human values and societal needs. Yes, the market can be a powerful motivator for human advancement. But unchecked power always becomes self-perpetuating. It is only a force for good if some kind of limiting mechanism is applied. Some kind of …governor. Yes, there’s that word again. The only way to keep the market from running amok, the only way to regulate those forces that manipulate and control and would run roughshod over the world and all the rest of us, is to apply that which the libertarian instinctively hates…governmnet. Government to assure that industry and individuals make their share of contributions to the common good. Government to regulate the exploitation of labor and to prevent monopolies. Democratic government to partner with and steer industry, to see that at least some of the time it acts altruistically. To ensure that publically-held resources (water, air, land) are not abused.
It is no surprise that the libertarian hates government. Government, good, democratic government will always be opposed to greed-driven short-sighted laissez faire. But properly regulated…properly governed, both libertarianism and it’s first cousin capitalism can be forces for good.