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What you should argue for is that the government stop subsidizing farmers (and everyone else) altogether. That way, you don't have to worry about unintended con

What you should argue for is that the government stop subsidizing farmers (and everyone else) altogether. That way, you don't have to worry about unintended consequences inherent in any subsidy program. (Nothing bad happens when you don't rob Peter or Paul.) The important thing is not the political reality of the moment, but the philosophy people go by in the future.

hyperbovine 17y ago
I seem to recall the very Internets on which you are now ranting arising out of a government-subsidized research program. Irony.
- maxharris 17y ago
  Sure. But do you really think that the only possible technologies that could give you the features of the current internet are TCP, IP and Unix? There are lots of ways to do networking, and government subsidy didn't pay for all of them. (Even if HTTP didn't exist, gopher would have filled in just fine!) Nor did it pay for the commercialization of the web browser, which is what made it truly practical for people to use the web. (Remember that before Netscape, browsers from academia didn't support JPEG, and javascript hadn't been invented yet.)
  - hyperbovine 17y ago
    The failure of private firms to account for network externalities is one of the classic examples of coordination failure. So yes, the fact that the US government stepped in and built ARPAnet probably accelerated the emergence of what you and I call the internet by a decade or more. I agree that private innovation almost always outpaces public innovation. But it took massive government to get the ball rolling in the first place. You need to keep this in mind next time you make silly overgeneralizations like "all subsidies are bad."
    - maxharris 17y ago
      You need to substantiate your claim that ARPAnet accelerated the internet by a decade. Why didn't we see ARPAnet get huge in the early 1980s? The real bottleneck to internet adoption was the lack of computing power (memory and CPU), which were necessary for the rise of graphical interfaces, which were necessary for lots of people to be able to use computers. These things were developed rapidly, and privately. The limits that were pushed to do this were not government edicts, but physical constraints (heat dissipation, die shrinks.) Remember that Xerox PARC was a private research lab! The "lead" you're talking about sat idle for twenty years until cheap computers got good enough to help normal people. Therefore that "lead" was essentially wasted according to any sensible economic theory. (I think that ARPAnet was technically great, and TCP/IP, sockets, Unix, etc., are all fine technologies. All I'm saying is that we're at no loss economically if technological development is paid for in a moral way, rather than the way we do it now.)
    - infinite8s 17y ago
      subsidies != research funding
- rsheridan6 17y ago
  That was a military program - hardly the same as propping up an industry. Even libertarians accept the need for a military.
grannyg00se 17y ago
Subsidizing things like education and health care seems like a good idea to me. Subsidizing poison, kind of offensive.

hyperbovine 17y ago

I seem to recall the very Internets on which you are now ranting arising out of a government-subsidized research program. Irony.

maxharris 17y ago
Sure. But do you really think that the only possible technologies that could give you the features of the current internet are TCP, IP and Unix? There are lots of ways to do networking, and government subsidy didn't pay for all of them. (Even if HTTP didn't exist, gopher would have filled in just fine!) Nor did it pay for the commercialization of the web browser, which is what made it truly practical for people to use the web. (Remember that before Netscape, browsers from academia didn't support JPEG, and javascript hadn't been invented yet.)
- hyperbovine 17y ago
  The failure of private firms to account for network externalities is one of the classic examples of coordination failure. So yes, the fact that the US government stepped in and built ARPAnet probably accelerated the emergence of what you and I call the internet by a decade or more. I agree that private innovation almost always outpaces public innovation. But it took massive government to get the ball rolling in the first place. You need to keep this in mind next time you make silly overgeneralizations like "all subsidies are bad."
  - maxharris 17y ago
    You need to substantiate your claim that ARPAnet accelerated the internet by a decade. Why didn't we see ARPAnet get huge in the early 1980s? The real bottleneck to internet adoption was the lack of computing power (memory and CPU), which were necessary for the rise of graphical interfaces, which were necessary for lots of people to be able to use computers. These things were developed rapidly, and privately. The limits that were pushed to do this were not government edicts, but physical constraints (heat dissipation, die shrinks.) Remember that Xerox PARC was a private research lab! The "lead" you're talking about sat idle for twenty years until cheap computers got good enough to help normal people. Therefore that "lead" was essentially wasted according to any sensible economic theory. (I think that ARPAnet was technically great, and TCP/IP, sockets, Unix, etc., are all fine technologies. All I'm saying is that we're at no loss economically if technological development is paid for in a moral way, rather than the way we do it now.)
  - infinite8s 17y ago
    subsidies != research funding
rsheridan6 17y ago
That was a military program - hardly the same as propping up an industry. Even libertarians accept the need for a military.

grannyg00se 17y ago

Subsidizing things like education and health care seems like a good idea to me. Subsidizing poison, kind of offensive.