Blood in the Gears of the "Machinery of Freedom"?
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- >>"The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem >>of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small >>children and great nations." -- David Friedman, >>_The_Machinery_of_Freedom_ > > > It's one of my favorites, too. > > One hopes that if there is an afterlife he has a chance to explain it > to his six million fellow Jews who went to the crematoria chanting > this mantra. > > Or he could fly to Rwanda and tell this to the Hutus and Tutsis. Touché. Nietzsche's "Where are your claws?", and all that. Certainly the creation of superior force-capability, and the will to use it, especially on people who can't or won't fight back, creates situations like the above. The book "Guns, Germs, and Steel" is chock-a-block with examples of the same kind of thing throughout human history. It's interesting, nonetheless, that the cases above are perfect examples of exactly what David Friedman (for those here who don't know of him, he's the current intellectual standard-bearer for anarcho-capitalism, a "law and economics" professor in Santa Clara, and the son of Milton and Rose Friedman) was talking about: nation states using force as a poor solution to the distribution of limited resources. In the first example, the Nazis distributed, by force, the resources of mostly unarmed Jews. The same Nazis who came to power themselves because of a completely uneconomic World War I reparation/ resource-redistribution scheme. A scheme imposed, by force, at the armistice, by other states, including the U.S. A "great nation", which, by the way, was the sole holdout against relaxation of those reparations in the face of the very German hyperinflation that gave the Nazi party its start to begin with. It was also, not cooincidentally, the same "great nation" who had to, later, using its own force, distribute the resources, if not the lives, taken by Nazis from the Jews, or, more properly, to destroy those expropriated resources almost completely. Killing the economic patient to save him, as it were. In the second example, there's a post-colonial Rwandan government, controlled by a previously disempowered majority (created, again by another nation state, France, or Belgium, or whoever) looking the other way while the majority population itself took it upon themselves, mostly, to distribute the resources of a comparatively richer minority with in a machete-slashing bloodbath. The fact that a colonizing nation-state had the ability to merge those two iron-spear-armed enemy populations at gunpoint sometime in the past might have also had something to do with the problem, I think. Fat lot of good it does to either set of victims, no matter how right the analysis is, of course. Note, nonetheless, that in both cases, people contracted with their government to protect the most precious resource of all, their lives, or, more properly, their freedom, from "distribution by force", and their government failed to live up to whatever contract they thought they had. Proving that, more often than not, laws, and, frankly, constitutions, say what the guys with the guns say they do, and no more -- and why it's also very important for *everyone* to be "one of the guys with guns" as a result. So David Friedman, being, like lots of us here, an anarchocapitalist, would probably think that privately operated markets for force would have prevented both incidents before they even started. Meaning that the heretofore-massacred millions would have instead been in possession of arms, freely available in an open market for same, and, more importantly, convinced of the necessity to provide for their own defense, and trained accordingly. And, again, saying something is right doesn't make it so, which, I suppose, might have been the point, even if Friedman has been saying it in the language of economics instead of moral outrage. Which brings me to the reason I still like the quote above, in spite of such an apparently strenuous objection to it. [The 20% or so of you who are long-time cypherpunks, and who've heard me say the following before, can skip it, I bet. :-).] I think we have tranfer-priced violence-enforced (lie about a trade, go to jail) monopoly-structured markets for a reason, and that's because it's cheaper than, as Pierpont Morgan might have put it, "ruinous competition" between competing economic entities. Human heads, until the advent of electromechanical switches in the 1930's or so, were the only "switches" of information available. Such expensive switches make for hierarchical, transfer-priced economic networks, and the faster the transmission of information, over longer distances, the larger those hierarchies become. Under those kinds of conditions, it's better to merge someone else's firm into yours, than it is to compete with it, even if the firm is a force monopoly called a nation-state. That, ultimately, is where large empire-scale nation-states like China, t
Blood in the Gears of the "Machinery of Freedom"?
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- >>"The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem >>of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small >>children and great nations." -- David Friedman, >>_The_Machinery_of_Freedom_ > > > It's one of my favorites, too. > > One hopes that if there is an afterlife he has a chance to explain it > to his six million fellow Jews who went to the crematoria chanting > this mantra. > > Or he could fly to Rwanda and tell this to the Hutus and Tutsis. Touché. Nietzsche's "Where are your claws?", and all that. Certainly the creation of superior force-capability, and the will to use it, especially on people who can't or won't fight back, creates situations like the above. The book "Guns, Germs, and Steel" is chock-a-block with examples of the same kind of thing throughout human history. It's interesting, nonetheless, that the cases above are perfect examples of exactly what David Friedman (for those here who don't know of him, he's the current intellectual standard-bearer for anarcho-capitalism, a "law and economics" professor in Santa Clara, and the son of Milton and Rose Friedman) was talking about: nation states using force as a poor solution to the distribution of limited resources. In the first example, the Nazis distributed, by force, the resources of mostly unarmed Jews. The same Nazis who came to power themselves because of a completely uneconomic World War I reparation/ resource-redistribution scheme. A scheme imposed, by force, at the armistice, by other states, including the U.S. A "great nation", which, by the way, was the sole holdout against relaxation of those reparations in the face of the very German hyperinflation that gave the Nazi party its start to begin with. It was also, not cooincidentally, the same "great nation" who had to, later, using its own force, distribute the resources, if not the lives, taken by Nazis from the Jews, or, more properly, to destroy those expropriated resources almost completely. Killing the economic patient to save him, as it were. In the second example, there's a post-colonial Rwandan government, controlled by a previously disempowered majority (created, again by another nation state, France, or Belgium, or whoever) looking the other way while the majority population itself took it upon themselves, mostly, to distribute the resources of a comparatively richer minority with in a machete-slashing bloodbath. The fact that a colonizing nation-state had the ability to merge those two iron-spear-armed enemy populations at gunpoint sometime in the past might have also had something to do with the problem, I think. Fat lot of good it does to either set of victims, no matter how right the analysis is, of course. Note, nonetheless, that in both cases, people contracted with their government to protect the most precious resource of all, their lives, or, more properly, their freedom, from "distribution by force", and their government failed to live up to whatever contract they thought they had. Proving that, more often than not, laws, and, frankly, constitutions, say what the guys with the guns say they do, and no more -- and why it's also very important for *everyone* to be "one of the guys with guns" as a result. So David Friedman, being, like lots of us here, an anarchocapitalist, would probably think that privately operated markets for force would have prevented both incidents before they even started. Meaning that the heretofore-massacred millions would have instead been in possession of arms, freely available in an open market for same, and, more importantly, convinced of the necessity to provide for their own defense, and trained accordingly. And, again, saying something is right doesn't make it so, which, I suppose, might have been the point, even if Friedman has been saying it in the language of economics instead of moral outrage. Which brings me to the reason I still like the quote above, in spite of such an apparently strenuous objection to it. [The 20% or so of you who are long-time cypherpunks, and who've heard me say the following before, can skip it, I bet. :-).] I think we have tranfer-priced violence-enforced (lie about a trade, go to jail) monopoly-structured markets for a reason, and that's because it's cheaper than, as Pierpont Morgan might have put it, "ruinous competition" between competing economic entities. Human heads, until the advent of electromechanical switches in the 1930's or so, were the only "switches" of information available. Such expensive switches make for hierarchical, transfer-priced economic networks, and the faster the transmission of information, over longer distances, the larger those hierarchies become. Under those kinds of conditions, it's better to merge someone else's firm into yours, than it is to compete with it, even if the firm is a force monopoly called a nation-state. That, ultimately, is where large empire-scale nation-states like China, t
