On 05/31/2012 04:19 PM, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Craig Haynie <cchayniepub...@gmail.com
<mailto:cchayniepub...@gmail.com>> wrote:
If the technology is cost efficient, then the market will bring
it. Even if delayed by 20 to 50 years, this is a small price to
pay for a moral society run without threats of violence.
You want to talk about violence?
If France and the UK had delayed developing aviation before WWI they
would have lost the war. They had a slight edge thanks to aircraft
such as the Sopwith Camel (the best fighter of the war, based on enemy
aircraft losses). Slight, but crucial.
So is it your argument that national defense is so important that
therefore, we have to use a little aggression here and there to protect
ourselves from a larger aggression from invading armies? If so, then I
suggest that you live in the best of all possible worlds because this
'little aggression' is used for justification for every program, policy,
law, regulation, and statute, that governments create. There is no such
thing as minor aggression which can be used for a larger good. If we
want to protect our lives and property, does it make sense to give one
large institution the one great exception, which allows it to take our
lives and property at will?
Or if the British had delayed the Hurricane, the Spitfire and radar in
the 1930s, Hitler would have won in 1940.
If the U.S. had not invested in the bomb, I am sure there would have
been a million more Japanese killed or died of starvation, hundreds of
thousands more Americans killed, and Japan would have been divided
between the North and South, like Korea, because the Russians were
preparing to invade from the North. U.S. invasion forces in Japan
included 800,000 men, compared to just over 100,000 in the Normandy
invasion.
If enough people are worried about staying ahead of the enemy, and if
the government has to budget its limited resources to protect the
country, then nothing is stopping them from trying to raise the money to
do so. I am just saying that we have to get rid of this moral exception.
Do we know that the government could not raise enough money to maintain
its nuclear arsenal, to deter foreign aggression? No one is even
thinking about it. No one is trying to find alternate solutions which
don't involve aggression. It would be a different world, and one which
probably would not come about without a large number of people who
believe in it; and if a large number of people from all over the world
started believing in non-aggression, then it's likely no new Hitlers
will show up, and if they did, they would still have to face a
voluntarily funded nuclear arsenal.
In every case, the overall investments made by governments has
paid back many times over. Individual ventures failed but
overall the projects succeeded.
Not true. There was no return for the people whose money was
taken. There was no poll of those people, before their money was
taken, asking if they'd be willing to invest.
Yes, there was. It is called an election. The Erie canal was a major
political issue and policy. Road building has always been a make or
break local issue, as it is in Atlanta this year.
The election did not poll the individual people whose money was taken,
and did not give them the choice to invest or not. The election takes a
majority of those who show up at the polls and gives them, and their
party, the authority to use force against others, so that they can
pursue their own pet projects.
[...]
This is another way of saying that the other investments during
this period were both profitable and of lower risk. Who knows what
would have come out of these investments if these people had had
more money to invest in the ventures they were interested in,
instead of having their money taken from them.
Wonderful in theory. In practice it has never worked that way, and it
never will. Here in the real world Uncle Sam has always been the main
source of technological progress. You are living in an Ivory Tower.
There's a saying by some that the Means justifies the Ends. I think we
should start looking toward the Means AS the End.
Craig
