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To some of us the free market is integrity and the government and regulations are unethical beasts meant to be slain with technology. I see AirBnB and Uber as i

To some of us the free market is integrity and the government and regulations are unethical beasts meant to be slain with technology. I see AirBnB and Uber as innovators in that space. I think it's more a cultural shift away from libertarianism amongst a new generation of techies as the cause of the disconnect.

wpietri 11y ago
I have a hard time understanding that as anything other than a religious view. And a relatively new one, despite your claim that people are shifting away. Read, for example, The Economist, which for 150 years has been advocating for free markets and against excess regulation. They've been doing it so long they prefer the phrase "classical liberal"; to them, "libertarian" is a johnny-come-lately term. Every time they advocate this stuff they do it not based on a tautological "markets are good because markets" argument. For them, markets are the best way to accomplish human ends: people that are better off, freer, more independent. But when markets work against that, they say so. For example, they're strong supporters of a carbon tax, because they see that as the least intrusive way to prevent further degradation on the atmosphere. Markets are tools, just like computers are. They can be used well or used poorly, for good or for bad. In my view you have mistaken a mechanism for the purpose. When we decide how to structure society, it cannot be to serve the individual aesthetic or ideological views of a narrow group. It has to be to best serve its members. Nothing else is sustainable.
- exstudent2 11y ago
  I see free markets as providing the least resistance to unfettered technological progress (which is ultimately what I'm after). I don't think it's worthwhile to "decide how to structure society". Society should be emergent from individual freedom. Central planning can only cover the needs/ideologies of those doing the planning (and probably not even that). Admittedly my views are radically post-modern and include a healthy dose of moral relativism i.e. there is no "best" way to serve society's members, just progress and the by-product of that progress.
  - wpietri 11y ago
    Ok. You are after something that you define as "progress". Why do you think everybody else should act in ways that maximize what you want? Also, you have already decided how you want society to be structured, which is devotion to a very particular definition of "individual freedom". (Other people have broader definitions of freedom that they are equally devoted to.) I agree that there's no intrinsically "best" way to do things, but that doesn't mean we can't jointly converge on a shared understanding of "best". Indeed, I think it means we must work very hard to do so. Since God is dead, we must take up the work we previously assigned to him. I'd also suggest you haven't really paid much attention to where your kind of progress comes from. Free markets (which require a fair bit of regulation to maintain) are a decent way to optimize certain things. But they aren't really good at anything that has relatively long payoff times. Anything with a payoff time of more than 25 years or so should be ignored because its net present value is zero. Anything where the value is hard to capture is effectively worthless, and that includes things like society-wide vaccinations, moon landings, GPS, the Hubble telescope, and our many interplanetary probes. Or take the Internet. It came purely out of tax funding. The commercial equivalents were evolutionary dead ends like Compuserve and AOL, centralized fiefdoms with low interoperability. The network technology that drives it wasn't invented by AT&T, who had no interest in things that reduced their central control. (For more see the excellent history When Wizards Stay Up Late.) If not for net neutrality regulation, many Internet companies wouldn't exist; monopoly or oligopoly network providers would have made it too hard or extracted too much monopoly rent. Or consider basic science research. Einstein never had a market-driven job in his life, and it's a good thing, as his freedom from practical concerns let him do amazing work. Very few Nobel laureates had anything approaching commercial goals or commercial support. I'd call the detection of gravity waves major progress, but that work received massive tax funding. Etc, etc, etc.
    - exstudent2 11y ago
      I'm not sure we've ever seen a 100% free market so while regulation appears on the surface to have been helpful, it could be viewed as solving problems caused by other regulations. It's also important to note that the vast majority of major progress (including your examples) have been tied to war, conflict and war-like situations (Cold War). Human conflict will continue to be a driver of progress but we've reached a state where the agents engaged in that conflict need not be centralized in the form of a government. Some of us would like to race toward that situation while others believe there's redeemable qualities in the status quo. Interesting times as that dichotomy will likely grow as individuals continue to be networked together without the limitations of geography or citizenship.

wpietri 11y ago

I have a hard time understanding that as anything other than a religious view. And a relatively new one, despite your claim that people are shifting away. Read, for example, The Economist, which for 150 years has been advocating for free markets and against excess regulation. They've been doing it so long they prefer the phrase "classical liberal"; to them, "libertarian" is a johnny-come-lately term. Every time they advocate this stuff they do it not based on a tautological "markets are good because markets" argument. For them, markets are the best way to accomplish human ends: people that are better off, freer, more independent. But when markets work against that, they say so. For example, they're strong supporters of a carbon tax, because they see that as the least intrusive way to prevent further degradation on the atmosphere. Markets are tools, just like computers are. They can be used well or used poorly, for good or for bad. In my view you have mistaken a mechanism for the purpose. When we decide how to structure society, it cannot be to serve the individual aesthetic or ideological views of a narrow group. It has to be to best serve its members. Nothing else is sustainable.

exstudent2 11y ago
I see free markets as providing the least resistance to unfettered technological progress (which is ultimately what I'm after). I don't think it's worthwhile to "decide how to structure society". Society should be emergent from individual freedom. Central planning can only cover the needs/ideologies of those doing the planning (and probably not even that). Admittedly my views are radically post-modern and include a healthy dose of moral relativism i.e. there is no "best" way to serve society's members, just progress and the by-product of that progress.
- wpietri 11y ago
  Ok. You are after something that you define as "progress". Why do you think everybody else should act in ways that maximize what you want? Also, you have already decided how you want society to be structured, which is devotion to a very particular definition of "individual freedom". (Other people have broader definitions of freedom that they are equally devoted to.) I agree that there's no intrinsically "best" way to do things, but that doesn't mean we can't jointly converge on a shared understanding of "best". Indeed, I think it means we must work very hard to do so. Since God is dead, we must take up the work we previously assigned to him. I'd also suggest you haven't really paid much attention to where your kind of progress comes from. Free markets (which require a fair bit of regulation to maintain) are a decent way to optimize certain things. But they aren't really good at anything that has relatively long payoff times. Anything with a payoff time of more than 25 years or so should be ignored because its net present value is zero. Anything where the value is hard to capture is effectively worthless, and that includes things like society-wide vaccinations, moon landings, GPS, the Hubble telescope, and our many interplanetary probes. Or take the Internet. It came purely out of tax funding. The commercial equivalents were evolutionary dead ends like Compuserve and AOL, centralized fiefdoms with low interoperability. The network technology that drives it wasn't invented by AT&T, who had no interest in things that reduced their central control. (For more see the excellent history When Wizards Stay Up Late.) If not for net neutrality regulation, many Internet companies wouldn't exist; monopoly or oligopoly network providers would have made it too hard or extracted too much monopoly rent. Or consider basic science research. Einstein never had a market-driven job in his life, and it's a good thing, as his freedom from practical concerns let him do amazing work. Very few Nobel laureates had anything approaching commercial goals or commercial support. I'd call the detection of gravity waves major progress, but that work received massive tax funding. Etc, etc, etc.
  - exstudent2 11y ago
    I'm not sure we've ever seen a 100% free market so while regulation appears on the surface to have been helpful, it could be viewed as solving problems caused by other regulations. It's also important to note that the vast majority of major progress (including your examples) have been tied to war, conflict and war-like situations (Cold War). Human conflict will continue to be a driver of progress but we've reached a state where the agents engaged in that conflict need not be centralized in the form of a government. Some of us would like to race toward that situation while others believe there's redeemable qualities in the status quo. Interesting times as that dichotomy will likely grow as individuals continue to be networked together without the limitations of geography or citizenship.