Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Libertarian?
So my business partner Nick has been all up in the face of economics lately, and how freedoms work, which inevitably ends up at the Libertarian viewpoint. It's difficult to argue against market pressure and the idea of negative rights. But of course, people point out that there hasn't really been a significant pure-free-market society in the past.
I have a postulate. A libertarian society extends as far as effective communication.
You see, since you have no central structure, and everything works by contract and agreement, the ability to coordinate is based on the ability of people to collect and disseminate information. Not a single entity, but all people. That works pretty well when you're on the level of a village of a hundred people, and maybe even when you've got two or three villages working together. But not so much when you have entire nations who need to coordinate on large projects.
(There's also the fact that since a libertarian society wouldn't have a government, it wouldn't be recognized as a coherent state by historians, but whatever)
Now, though, we have really, really good communication. Look at Kickstarter, Google Maps, Twitter, email, IM...all the barriers that stop people from being able to communicate and coordinate on any arbitrary level are gone. The actual logistics of what coordination can accomplish are solved problems, so we actually have a chance to give it a try. What the hell, it's got to be better than what's going on now...
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