30
Jul
2019
Socialism Drove Ben Powell to Drink
And so would ancapistan, but I digress… Here’s my interview with Ben, promoting his new book with Bob Lawson.
And so would ancapistan, but I digress… Here’s my interview with Ben, promoting his new book with Bob Lawson.
The core of the iPhone (the BSD kernel) was indeed built by techno-hippies mostly students at Berkeley, plus various volunteers and some commercial contributors (e.g Sun Microsystems) chipped in to some extent. All that effort is simply given away for free, and turned out to be better that what Apple could do for themselves so they picked up the free software and ran with it. The BSD networking stack has become the ancestor of nearly all modern Internet connected devices. That said, the techno-hippie culture could only exist because of significant material surplus that allowed those people to spend their time away from subsistence living. The free software development has continued in many strands with neither price signals nor a central planner. There has been government money contributed to sone extent (DARPA contributed to early Internet Protocol development) and private donations to various college funds, universities etc. Mostly there just a lot of people interested in making it work.
Steve Jobs was good at these things:
* Self promotion … convincing people that he invented the GUI when it really came from Xerox and a few other places.
* Packaging … putting together a nice unit with better than average production value that customers find attractive.
* Business management … keeping employees in line, staying profitable.
* Using lawyers to knife the competitors … long list starting with Digital Research, then the many “Look & Feel” lawsuits, Apple lost most of these but didn’t matter because it put sufficient sand in the gears of other companies that Apple could get their products to market and maintain the mystique.
Commercially it’s been a working strategy for Apple, not sure it makes a great example of capitalism at its best.
As for exactly which countries are socialist, since all governments interfere somewhere, it depends on what you consider most important. Australia has imposed all sorts of value destroying restrictions on our farmers, unions have chased away most manufacturing, we have high tax, high minimum wafe, big welfare state, and we have unbelievable levels of regulations on everything anyone does here. Australia generally gets high “freedom scores”, presumably because tariffs are low? The Australian legal system and courts are mostly reasonable and there isn’t much DIRECT property confiscation.
In the USA you hear more horror stories about cops shooting random people and prisons packed full of people for very minor offences. Then again, tax is much lower in most US states.
Finally, the question of immigration and voting … California used to be Republican but unlikely to ever be that way again. Texas probably will be next to flip over, not sure when, but it’s heading there. OK, maybe for a Libertarian it’s a “who cares” difference because neither of the parties are good. Thing is quite a lot of people are now leaving California as it becomes less pleasant in terms of lifestyle. Clearly there is already a drift towards what might be seen as a “Progressive” type of government. See how long Texas can keep a low tax and low regulation economy. Ben might be surprised how easily it turns around.
Same in Australia … government has been growing as long as I can remember and best effort is only just enough to slow that down. Australia tries hard to get a good mix of immigration and that makes a difference in terms of making it difficult for any single group to vote themselves largesse. They all want different things so they are forced to compromise. Even with that, government power is still growing. Very little response to Libertarian ideas around here. The so called “Liberal” party has a nominally classical liberal policy base, but they pretty much ignore that. Latest recommendation is a crackdown on cash transactions, forcing people to use bank transfers in preparation for future negative interest rates and new ways to tax.