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Non-Apocalypse, Existential Risk, and Why Humanity Will Prevail – Video by G. Stolyarov II

Non-Apocalypse, Existential Risk, and Why Humanity Will Prevail – Video by G. Stolyarov II

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Doomsday predictions are not only silly but bring about harmful ways of approaching life and the world. Mr. Stolyarov expresses his view that there will never be an end of the world, an end of humanity, or an end of civilization. While some genuine existential risks do exist, most of them are not man-made, and even the man-made risks are largely in the past.

References

– “Transhumanism and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics” – Video by G. Stolyarov II

Transhumanism as a Grand Conservatism – Article by G. Stolyarov II

Transhumanism as a Grand Conservatism – Article by G. Stolyarov II

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The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
November 25, 2012
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For anyone interested in the history of life-extension ideas, I highly recommend Ilia Stambler’s 2010 paper, “Life extension – a conservative enterprise? Some fin-de-siècle and early twentieth-century precursors of transhumanism“. This extensively researched and cosmopolitan work explores the ideas of five proto-transhumanist thinkers who embedded their future-oriented thoughts in extremely different intellectual frameworks: Nikolai Fedorov, Charles Stephens, Alexander Bogdanov, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jean Finot. Mr. Stambler considers Finot’s thought to most resemble the ideas of today’s transhumanist movement.

The conclusions of Mr. Stambler’s research are profound and interesting to explore. One of the main insights is that it is possible to arrive at support for radical life extension from many different ideological frameworks. Mr. Stambler writes that “In different national contexts, different ideological schemes – secular humanism or religion, discrimination or egalitarianism, idealism or materialism, socialism or capitalism, liberalism or totalitarianism – appear to yield different justifications for the necessity of life prolongation and longevity research and to impact profoundly on the way such goals are conceived and pursued. As the works of the above-said proponents of human enhancement and longevity exemplify, the authors adapt to a particular national ideological milieu and serve as agents for its continuation.”

This is a welcome insight in the sense that it should be possible to attract an immensely intellectually and culturally diverse following to the cause of indefinite human life extension. However, it is also the case that some political and cultural environments are more conducive to rapid progress in human life extension than others. I have recently articulated my view that a libertarian set of policies will, by unshackling competition and innovation by numerous entities on a free market, result in the most rapid advent of the technologies sought by transhumanists. That being said, I still perceive much common ground with non-libertarians to be achievable on the issue of life extension – for instance, in the realms of supporting specific research, spreading public awareness, sharing information, and coming together to advocate for policy positions on which we can agree. Also, it is possible that non-libertarian transhumanists might benefit their own intellectual traditions by steering them toward more technology-friendly and life-respecting directions. As an atheist libertarian transhumanist, I would greatly prefer to be debating with transhumanist environmentalists, transhumanist socialists, and transhumanist Christians (yes, they do exist) than their mainstream counterparts of today.

Another key insight of Mr. Stambler’s paper resonates with me personally. Mr. Stambler ventures to “suggest is that the pursuit of human enhancement and life extension may originate in conservatism, both biological and social. There is a close conjunction between the ideas of life extension, transcending human nature and creating artificial life, in Finot’s writings and those of present-day transhumanists. The connection (and progression) between these enterprises may appear logical: the means initially designed to conserve life may exceed their purpose, and beginning as a search to preserve a natural bodily status quo, the aspirations may rapidly expand into attempts to modify nature. It appears to me that these enterprises evolve in this, and not in the reverse order. The primary aspiration is not to modify nature, but to preserve a natural state.”

Anyone who has followed my work over the years would be unable to avoid my generally conservative esthetic, my strong interest in history, and my admiration for the achievements and legacies of prior eras. I am mostly not a conservative in the American or even European political sense, but I am conservative in the sense of seeking to preserve and build upon the achievements of Western civilization – including the development of its logical implications for future decades and centuries. Technological progress and the achievement of indefinite life extension are very much the direct extrapolation of the desire to preserve the historical achievements that enable our unprecedented quality of life today. Furthermore, my transhumanism grows out of a desire to preserve my own body and mind in a youthful state – so as to maintain a life driven primarily by my own choices and the manner in which I set up the environment around me. In order for me to remain who I am, and to do what I wish to do, I need to support radical technological change and changes to our society in general. However, those changes are fundamentally aimed at supporting that pattern of life which I consider to be good – and which today, unfortunately, is far too subject to destructive external influences over which no individual yet has sufficient influence or control. Unlike some transhumanists, I have no ambitions to have my mind “uploaded,”  to lead a non-biological existence, or “merge” my mind with anyone else’s. If I obtain indefinite life, I will spend it indefinitely looking the way I do (while remedying any flaws) and focusing on the perpetuation of my family, property, esthetic, and activities – all the while learning continuously and becoming a better (and more durable) version of the person I already am. For the true stability of home, family, property, and patterns of living, there must be individual sovereignty. For true individual sovereignty to exist, our society must improve rapidly in every dimension, so as to facilitate the hyper-empowerment of every person. Ironically, for one’s personal sphere to be conserved and shaped to one’s will, a revolution in the universe is necessary.

Cultural and historical preservation is also a major but seldom appreciated implication of transhumanism. By living longer and remaining in a youthful state, specific individuals would be able to create and refine their skills to a much greater extent. Imagine the state of classical music if we could have had hundreds of years for Mozart and Beethoven to compose – or the state of painting if Leonardo, Vermeer, or David had lived for centuries. Every time a creator dies, an irreplaceable vision dies with him. Others might emulate him, but it is not the same – for they do not have his precise mind. They can replicate and absorb into their own esthetic what he already brought into this world, but they cannot foresee the new directions in which he would have taken his work with more time. Each individual is precious and irreplaceable; the loss of each individual is the loss of a whole universe of memories, ideas, and possibilities. Transhumanism is a grand conservatism – an ambition to conserve people – to put an end to all such senseless destruction and to keep around all of the people who build up and beautify our world. The proto-transhumanist Nikolai Fedorov (one of those Christian transhumanists who ought to be much more prevalent among the Christians of today) even took this idea to the point of proposing an ultimate goal to physically resurrect every person who has ever lived. While, as I have written earlier, this would not resurrect the “I-nesses” of these individuals, achieving this goal might nonetheless give us the benefit of recapitulating their memories and experiences and seeing how their “doubles” might further develop themselves in a more advanced world.

It is precisely the conservative sensibility in me that recoils against “letting go” of the good things in life – whether they be my present advantages or the positive legacies of the past. It is precisely the conservative part of me that hates “starting from scratch” when something good and useful is no longer available because it has fallen prey to damaging external events. To allow the chaos of senseless destruction – the decay and ruin introduced by the inanimate processes of nature and the stupidity of men – is a sheer waste. Many put up with this sad state of affairs today because it has hitherto been unavoidable. But once the technical possibilities emerge to put an end to such destruction, then leaving it to wreak its havoc would become a moral outrage. Once we are able to truly control and direct our own lives, the stoic acceptance of ruin will become one of those aspects of history that we could confidently leave in the past.

How Government Sort of Created the Internet – Article by Steve Fritzinger

How Government Sort of Created the Internet – Article by Steve Fritzinger

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The New Renaissance Hat
Steve Fritzinger
October 6, 2012
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Editor’s Note: Vinton Cerf, one of the individuals whose work was pivotal in the development of the Internet, has responded to this article in the comments below. Read his response here.

In his now-famous “You didn’t build that” speech, President Obama said, “The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.”

Obama’s claim is in line with the standard history of the Internet. That story goes something like this: In the 1960s the Department of Defense was worried about being able to communicate after a nuclear attack. So it directed the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to design a network that would operate even if part of it was destroyed by an atomic blast. ARPA’s research led to the creation of the ARPANET in 1969. With federal funding and direction the ARPANET matured into today’s Internet.

Like any good creation myth, this story contains some truth. But it also conceals a story that is much more complicated and interesting. Government involvement has both promoted and retarded the Internet’s development, often at the same time. And, despite Obama’s claims, the government did not create the Internet “so all the companies could make money off” it.

The idea of internetworking was first proposed in the early 1960s by computer scientist J. C. R. Licklider at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN). BBN was a private company that originally specialized in acoustic engineering. After achieving some success in that field—for example, designing the acoustics of the United Nations Assembly Hall—BBN branched out into general R&D consulting. Licklider, who held a Ph.D. in psychoacoustics, had become interested in computers in the 1950s. As a vice president at BBN he led the firm’s growing information science practice.

In a 1962 paper Licklider described a “network of networks,” which he called the “Intergalactic Computer Network.” This paper contained many of the ideas that would eventually lead to the Internet. Its most important innovation was “packet switching,” a technique that allows many computers to join a network without requiring expensive direct links between each pair of machines.

Licklider took the idea of internetworking with him when he joined ARPA in 1962. There he met computer science legends Ivan Sutherland and Bob Taylor. Sutherland and Taylor continued developing Licklider’s ideas. Their goal was to create a network that would allow more effective use of computers scattered around university and government laboratories.

In 1968 ARPA funded the first four-node packet-switched network. This network was not part of a Department of Defense (DOD) plan for post-apocalyptic survival. It was created so Taylor wouldn’t have to switch chairs so often. Taylor routinely worked on three different computers and was tired of switching between terminals. Networking would allow researchers like Taylor to access computers located around the country without having dedicated terminals for each machine.

The first test of this network was in October 1969, when Charley Kline, a student at UCLA, attempted to transmit the command “login” to a machine at the Stanford Research Institute. The test was unsuccessful. The network crashed and the first message ever transmitted over what would eventually become the Internet was simply “lo.”

With a bit more debugging the four-node network went live in December 1969, and the ARPANET was born. Over the next two decades the ARPANET would serve as a test bed for internetworking. It would grow, spawn other networks, and be transferred between DOD agencies. For civilian agencies and universities, NSFNET, operated by the National Science Foundation, replaced ARPANET in 1985. ARPANET was finally shut down in February 1990. NSFNET continued to operate until 1995, during which time it grew into an important backbone for the emerging Internet.

For its entire existence the ARPANET and most of its descendants were restricted to government agencies, universities, and companies that did business with those entities. Commercial use of these networks was illegal. Because of its DOD origins ARPANET was never opened to more than a handful of organizations. In authorizing funds for NSFNET, Congress specified that it was to be used only for activities that were “primarily for research and education in the sciences and engineering.”

During this time the vast majority of people were banned from the budding networks. None of the services, applications, or companies that define today’s Internet could exist in this environment. Facebook may have been founded by college students, but it was not “primarily for research and education in the sciences and engineering.”

This restrictive environment finally began to change in the mid-1980s with the arrival of the first dial-up bulletin boards and online services providers. Companies like Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL took advantage of the home computer to offer network services over POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) lines. With just a PC and a modem, a subscriber could access email, news, and other services, though at the expense of tying up the house’s single phone line for hours.

In the early 1990s these commercial services began to experiment with connections between themselves and systems hosted on NSFNET. Being able to access services hosted on a different network made a network more valuable, so service providers had to interoperate in order to survive.

ARPANET researchers led by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn had already created many of the standards that the Internet service providers (ISPs) needed to interconnect. The most important standard was the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). In the 1970s computers used proprietary technologies to create local networks. TCP/IP was the “lingua franca” that allowed these networks to communicate regardless of who operated them or what types of computers were used on them. Today most of these proprietary technologies are obsolete and TCP/IP is the native tongue of networking. Because of TCP/IP’s success Cerf and Kahn are known as “the fathers of the Internet.”

Forced to interoperate, service providers rapidly adopted TCP/IP to share traffic between their networks and with NSFNET. The modern ISP was born. Though those links were still technically illegal, NSFNET’s commercial use restrictions were increasingly ignored.

The early 1990s saw the arrival of the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee, working at the European high energy physics lab CERN, created the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and Hyper-Text Markup Language (HTML). These three technologies made it easier to publish, locate, and consume information online. The web rapidly grew into the most popular use of the Internet.

Berners-Lee donated these technologies to the Internet community and was knighted for his work in 2004.

In 1993 Mosaic, the first widely adopted web browser, was released by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Mosaic was the first Internet application to take full advantage of Berners-Lee’s work and opened the Internet to a new type of user. For the first time the Internet became “so easy my mother can use it.”

The NCSA played a significant role in presidential politics. It had been created by the High Performance Computing & Communications Act of 1991 (aka “The Gore Bill”). In 1999 presidential candidate Al Gore cited this act in an interview about his legislative accomplishments,saying, “I took the initiative in creating the Internet.” This comment was shortened to: “I created the Internet” and quickly became a punchline for late-night comedians. This one line arguably cost Gore the presidency in 2000.

The 1992 Scientific and Advanced Technology Act, another Gore initiative, lifted some of the commercial restrictions on Internet usage. By mid-decade all the pieces for the modern Internet were in place.

In 1995, 26 years after its humble beginnings as ARPANET, the Internet was finally freed of government control. NSFNET was shut down. Operation of the Internet passed to mostly private companies, and all prohibitions on commercial use were lifted.

Anarchy, Property, and Innovation

Today the Internet can be viewed as three layers, each with its own stakeholders, business models, and regulatory structure. There are the standards, like TCP/IP, that control how information flows between networks, the physical infrastructure that actually comprises the networks, and the devices and applications that most people see as “the Internet.”

Since the Internet is really a collection of separate networks that have voluntarily joined together, there is no single central authority that owns or controls it. Instead, the Internet is governed by a loose collection of organizations that develop technologies and ensure interoperability. These organizations, like the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), may be the most successful anarchy ever.

Anarchy, in the classical sense, means without ruler, not without laws. The IETF demonstrates how well a true anarchy can work. The IETF has little formal structure. It is staffed by volunteers. Meetings are run by randomly chosen attendees. The closest thing there is to being an IETF member is being on the mailing list for a project and doing the work. Anyone can contribute to any project simply by attending the meetings and voicing an opinion. Something close to meritocracy controls whose ideas become part of the standards.

At the physical layer the Internet is actually a collection of servers, switches, and fiber-optic cables. At least in the United States this infrastructure is mostly privately owned and operated by for-profit companies like AT&T and Cox. The connections between these large national and international networks put the “inter” in Internet.

As for-profit companies ISPs compete for customers. They invest in faster networks, wider geographic coverage, and cooler devices to attract more monthly subscription fees. But ISPs are also heavily regulated companies. In addition to pleasing customers, they must also please regulators. This makes lobbying an important part of their business. According to the Center for Responsive Politics’s OpenSecrets website, ISPs and the telecommunications industry in general spend between $55 million and $65 million per year trying to influence legislation and regulation.

When most people think of the Internet they don’t think of a set of standards sitting on a shelf or equipment in a data center. They think of their smart phones and tablets and applications like Twitter and Spotify. It is here that Internet innovation has been most explosive. This is also where government has had the least influence.

For its first 20 years the Internet and its precursors were mostly text-based. The most popular applications, like email, Gopher (“Go for”), and Usenet news groups, had text interfaces. In the 20 years that commercial innovation has been allowed on the Internet, text has become almost a relic. Today, during peak hours, almost half of North American traffic comes from streaming movies and music. Other multimedia services, like video chat and photo sharing, consume much of people’s Internet time.

None of this innovation could have happened if the Internet were still under government control. These services were created by entrepreneurial trial and error. While some visionaries explored the possibilities of a graphically interconnected world as early as the 1960s, no central planning board knew that old-timey-looking photographs taken on ultramodern smart phones would be an important Internet application.

I, Internet

When Obama said the government created the Internet so companies could make money off it, he was half right. The government directly funded the original research into many core networking technologies and employed key people like Licklider, Taylor, Cerf, and Kahn. But after creating the idea the government sat on it for a quarter century and denied access to all but a handful of people. Its great commercial potential was locked away.

For proponents of government-directed research policies, the Internet proves the value of their programs. But government funding might not have been needed to create the Internet. The idea for internetwork came from BBN, a private company. The rise of ISPs in the 1980s showed that other companies were willing to invest in this space. Once the home PC and dial-up services became available, people joined commercial networks by the millions. The economic incentives to connect those early networks probably would have resulted in something very much like today’s Internet even if the ARPANET had never existed.

In the end the Internet rose from no single source. Like Leonard Read’s humble writing instrument, the pencil, no one organization could create the Internet. It took the efforts of thousands of engineers from the government and private sectors. Those engineers followed no central plan. Instead they explored. They competed. They made mistakes. They played.

Eventually they created a system that links a third of humanity. Now entrepreneurs all over the world are looking for the most beneficial ways to use that network.

Imagine where we’d be today if that search could have started five to ten years earlier.

Steve Fritzinger is a freelance writer from Fairfax,Virginia. He is the regular economics commentator on the BBC World Service program Business Daily.

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

The Golden Age of Freedom Is Still Ahead – Article by Anthony Gregory

The Golden Age of Freedom Is Still Ahead – Article by Anthony Gregory

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The New Renaissance Hat
Anthony Gregory
October 6, 2012
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Free enterprise is often associated with the past. This perception puts the market’s champions, seen as hopeless reactionaries, on the defensive.

A typical narrative follows: America had an insufficiently active government under the Articles of Confederation. The Constitution expanded the central government to meet society’s needs. In this climate, where property rights continued to trump the common good, the central government could not maintain national cohesion and ensure racial equality. During the Civil War, the federal government grew to preserve the Union, enable commerce through expansion of infrastructure, and abolish the ancient evil of slavery. During the late nineteenth century, laissez faire reigned supreme. Unchecked, robber barons exploited their customers and workers.

American society, so continues the narrative, overcame its laissez-faire history and embraced active government in the Progressive Era. Commerce, banking, monopolies, food and drugs, and labor conditions finally became regulated. The market was still too free, however, causing the stock market crash and the Great Depression, which the New Deal’s reforms finally addressed. Anachronistic free marketers resisted this progress.

A generation later the free market proved inadequate on race relations, education, poverty, social insurance, workers’ conditions, and the environment. New regulations, taxes, and programs arose in the 1960s and 1970s to address these deficiencies. Ronald Reagan’s election marked a conservative counterrevolution toward the free market, causing the savings-and-loan crisis, rising income disparities, and, ultimately, the 2008 financial collapse. After four consecutive reactionary presidents—Bill Clinton being a practitioner of neoliberal austerity—deregulation and market fundamentalism have again revealed themselves as outdated approaches to America’s modern problems.

This repeated recognition that the free market no longer suits society’s needs is a common theme of modern liberalism. Through experience the inadequacy of the unhampered market has forced enlightened observers to accept the need for more government.

One obvious problem with this narrative is the steadily changing definition of “free market.” The free market is said to have caused problems addressed in the Progressive Era, yet once again the market economy was blamed for the Depression.The New Deal is said finally to have abolished laissez faire, yet laissez faire has been the culprit in every crisis since. Thoughtful proponents of this narrative explain that the 1980s, for example, were somehow substantially more laissez-faire than the 1970s, yet they rarely present more than a handful of superficial examples of deregulation amid an overall trend of regulatory expansion.

A major problem market proponents have in confronting this narrative, whatever its shortcomings, arises because they themselves sometimes accept it implicitly, often complaining about the liberties lost over the years. The significant kernel of truth is that the national government has unmistakably grown well beyond anything imagined in 1789 or even the nineteenth century. And surely, for every argument statists have defending this growth, compelling historical and economic counterarguments are available.

Yet we must be careful before conceding this premise that the past was laissez-faire. By celebrating the political economy of yesteryear, we risk associating our ideals with the past’s many injustices. We can and should avoid this baggage entirely.

Slavery: The Opposite of Free Enterprise

No libertarian defends the horrid institution of slavery. The problem comes in how free marketers sometimes describe slavery as a mere exception to the rule of early American freedom. In fact this exception virtually swallowed the principle whole.

Progressives love contrasting the pro-liberty, anti-tax rhetoric of the founding generation with the slavery that they tolerated or championed. Robin Einhorn’s American Taxation, American Slavery is a sophisticated contribution to the argument that those loudly protesting taxes were often the very people who clung to human bondage. This argument indicts the rhetoric of property rights, which is foundational to free enterprise and, in a warped form, the “right” of one person to own another. Infamously, the Supreme Court found in Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857) that the Fifth Amendment protected a white man’s right not to be deprived of his slave without due process. Given this association between America’s slave-owning generations and the rhetoric of liberty, it is crucial that free marketers explain, emphatically and intelligently, how slavery was the very negation of the free-market system.

The subjugation of slaves would undermine early America’s status as a free country even if slaves were a tiny minority. They were not. Slaves amounted to 18 percent of the population at the time of the Constitution’s ratification and 12.6 percent on the eve of the Civil War, at which point there were nearly four million.

Libertarians should study the brutality of this system. Historians estimate that hundreds of thousands of slaves were forced to migrate in antebellum America’s internal slave trade. Children were frequently ripped from their families. Beatings and rape were ubiquitous, and torture as punishment was hardly unusual.

Even slaves with relatively humane masters lacked the freedoms that most of today’s Americans, living under the modern leviathan, take for granted.

Peter Kolchin, in his seminal American Slavery: 1619–1877, sums up the reality:

Slaves could hardly turn around without being told what to do.They lived by rules, sometimes carefully constructed and formally spelled out and sometimes haphazardly conceived and erratically imposed. Rules told them when to rise in the morning, when to go to the fields, when to break for meals, how long and how much to work, and when to go to bed; rules also dictated a broad range of activities that were forbidden without special permission, from leaving home to getting married; and rules allowed or did not allow a host of privileges, including the right to raise vegetables on garden plots, trade for small luxuries, hunt, and visit neighbors. Of course, all societies impose rules on their inhabitants in the form of laws, but the rules that bound slaves were unusually detailed, covered matters normally untouched by law, and were arbitrarily imposed and enforced, not by an abstract entity that (at least in theory) represented their interests, but by their owners. Slaves lived with their government.

I thank God I don’t live with my government! For many years the pro-market tradition saw slavery as a grave violation of its principles. Kolchin writes:

Early political economists—including Adam Smith, whose book The Wealth of Nations (1776) remained for decades the most influential justification for the principles underlying capitalism—believed that slavery, by preventing the free buying and selling of labor power and by eliminating the possibility of self-improvement that was the main incentive to productive labor, violated central economic laws.

Although critics blame market exchange for the rise of slavery, this criticism is grossly unfair. The slave trade was indeed a market of sorts—unfree, unjust, and regulated—but the most fundamental relationship in slavery was not a market at all. Kolchin explains:

Slave owners engaged in extensive commercial relations, selling cotton (and other agricultural products), buying items both for personal consumption and for use in their farming operations, borrowing money, and speculating in land and slaves, but the market was conspicuously absent in regulating relations between the masters and their slaves. In other words, relations of exchange were market-dominated, but relations of production were not.

The slave power dominated political life in the South and enjoyed federal support through the Fugitive Slave Clause. Slavery was a major government program, its enforcement costs socialized through law. “The chief way that the South’s slaveholding elite externalized the costs of the peculiar institution was slave patrols,” writes Jeffrey Rogers Hummel in Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men. These slave patrols were “established in every slave state” to enforce black codes, inflict punishment, and suppress insurrections and were “compulsory for most able bodied white males.” Slave patrols, necessary to slavery’s maintenance, were a flagrant violation of the free economy.

The destruction of the Indians, the restrictions on women owning property, and many other antebellum policies also illustrate that the United States hardly had a free market before the Civil War. Slavery best makes the point. The conflation of a slave society with free enterprise is an obscenity.

Protectionism, Nationalism, and Corporatism

Outside of slavery nineteenth-century America often fell far short of the free-market ideal. Protectionism was a perennial problem, from the nationalist Tariff of 1816 to the sectionally biased Tariff of 1824 and the infamous Tariff of Abominations in 1828, from President Andrew Jackson’s threat to invade South Carolina to enforce the Tariff of 1832 to the Morrill Tariff of 1861. In 1870 the average tariff rate hit 44.6 percent. High tariffs financed the corporatist arrangement of federal subsidies for waterways, canals, and railroads during the Civil War, a war that defied market principles dramatically through its taxation, conscription, militarization of society, massive inflation, and inauguration of new government bureaus.

After slavery’s abolition and before the twentieth century, American economic liberty in some senses achieved a peak, but not without many qualifications. Immediately after the Civil War, state-level black codes kept nominally free blacks in a form of extended slavery, indenturing them to employers and criminalizing “vagrancy.” The U.S.  government began enforcing Reconstruction in the conquered South through military rule. Reconstruction counteracted State-imposed rights violations but also fostered a rise in government education and infrastructure projects financed through federal subsidies and considerable hikes on state-level property taxes. Government schooling became much more prevalent in the South, and by the end of the century 75 percent of the states had compulsory attendance laws.

The banking system—fundamental to any modern economy—was regulated by the federal government for most of the nineteenth century. There was a National Bank from 1791 to 1811 and again from 1816 to 1832.The Civil War birthed a new federal banking system that quickly grew, eventually culminating in the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913.

In the late nineteenth century Benjamin Tucker identified four federally created monopoly powers that robbed Americans of their liberty—the land monopoly, money monopoly, patent monopoly, and tariff monopoly. These mostly involved federal privileges, but the heavy hand of government was also felt locally. Nineteenth-century state governments, at times working with federal authorities, displaced and killed American Indians; regulated various professions, labor relations, consumption goods, and businesses; and implemented social programs.

All in all, the U.S. regulatory state, explains Roderick Long, was not a twentieth-century innovation, but rather was “deeply involved from the start, particularly in the banking and currency industries and in the assignment of property titles to land. (Even such land as was not stolen from the natives was seldom appropriated in accordance with any sort of Lockean homesteading principle; instead, vast tracts of unimproved land were simply declared property by barbed wire or legislative fiat.)”

In substantial ways the economy of the late nineteenth century was freer than today, although some groups were heavily controlled, not least of all the southern blacks persecuted by Jim Crow laws, to say nothing of whites restricted by segregation from freely associating with these blacks.

Even nationally the twilight of the nineteenth century was a mixed bag. Veto-happy Grover Cleveland was probably the most laissez-faire president in half a century and ever since. Yet Cleveland’s terms had nontrivial blemishes: He used U.S. Marshals to quell the Pullman strike and enforce the Sherman Antitrust Act, supported the Dawes Act’s aggrandizement of presidential authority over Indian affairs, strengthened the Chinese Exclusion Act, begrudgingly acquiesced to an income tax to offset reduced tariff revenue, created the Interstate Commerce Commission, and despite a largely anti-imperialist record, threatened and used military force to assert dominance in Latin America against European influence and in favor of U.S. banking interests.

Shifting Definition

The market’s defenders often mimic its opponents in moving the benchmarks to describe historical periods as “laissez-faire.” This dangerous game does not stop with the nineteenth century.

American life before the New Deal was certainly freer in important respects, but we must be cautious in defending the 1920s. Putting aside the bloated bureaucracies lingering from World War I, the Fordney McCumber Tariff of 1922, the Immigration Control Act of 1924, and the calamity of alcohol prohibition, it was 1920s credit expansion that Austrian economists credibly blame for the boom and 1929 crash. We lose credibility in carelessly praising the pre–New Deal Era while blaming the Depression on policies enacted in that time.

Less ambitious free marketers idealize the 1950s—the decade of top marginal tax rates exceeding 90 percent (and, for the poorest Americans, 20 percent); the FCC’s puritanical regulation of the airwaves and maintenance of the telephone monopoly; the booming military-industrial complex; and the growing regimentation of industry, farming, and higher education. The transformative Great Society was in many ways an expansion on Eisenhower-era precedents more than a qualitative break from the past.

Even more desperate acts of nostalgia glorify the Reagan years. Although some government impositions were curtailed on the margins, Ronald Reagan oversaw growth of the New Deal–Great Society regime, as deficit spending exploded, Social Security and protectionism expanded, and foreign aid and bureaucracies ballooned.

None of this sober reflection backward should prompt us to see our history as an inexorable march toward liberty. There have been major advances in modern times—abolition of the draft, strengthened free-speech rights, and greater legal tolerance for minorities—but even in areas like racial oppression and personal freedom, many matters have worsened. Over two million Americans are behind bars. The drug war has devastated African-American communities. Last year the national government deported more immigrants than ever before. The war on terror has shredded basic rights. Washington’s run-of-the-mill economic interventions—in the name of health, equality, environmentalism, and fighting poverty—have escalated.The national debt and entitlement state have seen an unprecedented boom.

Neither today’s dismal state of affairs nor past oppression should make us nihilistic. History can teach us a lot about liberty. Certain areas of American life were freer in the nineteenth century than today and others were not, and the social blessings arising from relative conditions of liberty are worth identifying and understanding. Economics shows that free markets serve the masses by elevating workers’ productivity and smashing the old order of privilege and oppression. Both experience and economic science demonstrate the superiority of liberty to statism.

The golden era of freedom and free markets is not now and it’s not behind us. It is still ahead of us. This is reason to rejoice. We can happily envision a much better future.

Anthony Gregory is a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute.

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

Rand Paul’s Endorsement of Romney versus Ayn Rand’s and Murray Rothbard’s Historical Grudging Endorsements – Post by G. Stolyarov II

Rand Paul’s Endorsement of Romney versus Ayn Rand’s and Murray Rothbard’s Historical Grudging Endorsements – Post by G. Stolyarov II

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The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
September 2, 2012
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A September 1 post on the Facebook page of The Capitalism Institute reads: “I fully understand the hatred of Romney by libertarians who believe he’s a liberal in sheep’s clothing. That’s perfectly understandable. What I don’t understand is the notion that Rand Paul has somehow become an enemy of the liberty movement in the eyes of many because he endorsed Romney. Murray Rothbard once endorsed George Bush, Sr. Ayn Rand once endorsed Nixon.”

Yet I see Rand Paul’s endorsement of Mitt Romney as qualitatively different from the endorsements by either Ayn Rand or Murray Rothbard in previous election cycles. I think Ayn Rand unfortunately fell into the “lesser of two evils” trap when endorsing Nixon.

In particular, the following statement of Ayn Rand’s (quoted from this article by ARI Watch) is interesting: “If there were some campaign organization called ‘Anti-Nixonites for Nixon,’ it would name my position. The worst thing said about Nixon is that he cannot be trusted, which is true: he cannot be trusted to save this country. But one thing is certain: McGovern can destroy it.”

Rothbard’s endorsement of Bush, Sr., was also grudging. Rothbard wrote this: “Yes, gulp, I’m down to the grim, realistic choice: Which of two sets of bozos is going to rule us in 1993-1997? No one has been more critical of George Bush than I, but yes, dammit, I am working my way back to the President.”

If Rand Paul had explicitly stated that he was an “Anti-Romneyite for Romney” or stated that no one has been more critical of Romney than he – then I would have had more respect for his approach to this matter. At present, though, his comments after his endorsement of Romney have not at all highlighted Romney’s weaknesses or areas where Romney and Rand Paul disagreed. If Rand Paul had merely endorsed Romney to support “the lesser evil” in his mind, then I would still not share his opinion, but his mistake would be understandable. His actual endorsement of Romney, however, was not so grudging or reserved. Furthermore, he may have seen some (as of yet unrealized) personal political advantage from it, whereas neither Ayn Rand nor Rothbard had any personal political ambitions.

Additionally, since 1972 and even 1992, the two major political parties have come far closer together, to the point where Obama and Romney are virtually indistinguishable in their policy stances, even though they try to augment minutiae through volatile (and often outright deceptive) campaign rhetoric. Therefore, the contrasts that Ayn Rand drew between Nixon and McGovern – and those that Rothbard drew between Bush, Sr., and Clinton – cannot be drawn between Romney and Obama.  Voting for either party can no longer help “save” the country from the other (if it ever could, which I also doubt), because the same perils would befall us either way.

Cleveland Passed the Test of Character and Statesmanship – Article by Lawrence W. Reed

Cleveland Passed the Test of Character and Statesmanship – Article by Lawrence W. Reed

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The New Renaissance Hat
Lawrence W. Reed
July 31, 2012
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As usual, this year’s presidential campaign will test the popularity of two men. It will also tell us a lot about each man’s character, even if we think we already know all there is to know about them both. At this writing, some pundits are predicting a photo finish, maybe even a repeat of the 2000 Bush-Gore cliffhanger. Whatever the next few months produce, every presidential contest gets me pining for my personal favorite of the 44 men who have held the office—Grover Cleveland, America’s 22nd and 24th president.

Until 2000, the last time a close election produced a split decision in the popular vote and the Electoral College was 1888. Cleveland, the incumbent Democratic president, had been through a close one once before. In 1884 he won New York by just 1,200 votes—and with it, the presidency—but a switch of 601 votes in that one state alone would have swung the election to Republican James G. Blaine. Four years later Cleveland bested Benjamin Harrison by about 100,000 votes out of 11 million cast nationwide but he lost in the Electoral College 233–168. Because the contest was tight in a number of states, a slight shift in the popular vote plurality would have easily won it all for Cleveland.

Alyn Brodsky, in a biography entitled Grover Cleveland: A Study in Character, records that when reporters asked to what he ascribed his defeat, Cleveland smiled and said, “It was mainly because the other party had the most votes.” He did not equivocate. He did not whine and fret that he won more popular votes than Harrison. The “votes” to which he referred were the ones that really matter under the rules of the Constitution—Electoral College votes.

Cleveland handled his defeat with dignity. No recounts, no lawsuits, no spin, no acrimony. His grace in defeat was all the more remarkable considering that the loss meant he had to relinquish power he already possessed, not merely accept failure to attain it. He would not tolerate his political allies making an issue of the discrepancy between the popular and Electoral tallies. There was nary a hint of a “constitutional crisis” because the Constitution was Cleveland’s “controlling legal authority.” Cleveland retired to private life until he ran again in 1892, when he beat Harrison decisively, becoming the only American president to serve two nonconsecutive terms.

One reason the American people accepted the 1888 outcome in stride was that the federal government of that era just didn’t matter like the one of today does. Cleveland famously vetoed a bill to send federal money to drought-stricken farmers in Texas with the admonition, “Though the people support the government, it is not the duty of the government to support the people.”

In Cleveland’s day chronic budget surpluses at the federal level of government animated many a political contest, in stark contrast to the massive and endless deficits of today. While some people thought a surplus should be spent, Cleveland thought it was evidence that taxes were too high: “When more of the people’s sustenance is exacted through the form of taxation than is necessary to meet the just obligations of government, such exaction becomes ruthless extortion and a violation of the fundamental principles of a free government.”

Adjusted for inflation, the Obama administration spends more in one day than the first Cleveland administration spent in an entire year. Washington claims more than a quarter of national income now; in 1888, it managed to get by on about 3 percent. The two sides that will slug it out in the fall know that control of a gargantuan apparatus of money and power is at stake, and the temptations to pull out all the stops to win will be immense.

Even more emphatically, it was the character of Grover Cleveland that made the 1888 outcome a virtual nonevent. In so many ways he was a political oddity even for the Victorian times in which he served. Time and again he refused to do the politically expedient. For example, as a mayor, governor, and president, he rejected the spoils of victory and appointed the best people he could find—often earning the wrath of friends and party bigwigs because they didn’t get the nod. As biographer Brodsky puts it, “Here, indeed, was that rarest of political animals: one who believed his ultimate allegiance was to the nation, not to the party.”

Cleveland never lusted for public office. A prominent New York newspaper endorsed Cleveland for president in 1884 by declaring “three reasons” for voting for him: “1. He is an honest man. 2. He is an honest man. 3. He is an honest man.” He was, by all accounts, as utterly incorruptible when he left office as he was when he first assumed it. “Public office is a public trust” was an original Cleveland maxim.

Cleveland didn’t schmooze and slither his way through smoky backrooms to political power; nor did he exercise power as if he loved it for its own sake. He did the public’s business honestly and frugally and otherwise left us alone. It would not have occurred to him to so covet power as to fear private life. Trashing either the system or a good man’s character to obtain or hold on to public office was, to Grover Cleveland, unthinkable.

Every statesman is also a politician but not every politician is a statesman. Cleveland was so quintessentially statesmanlike that it hardly seems appropriate to note that he was also a politician. He certainly didn’t seek office for the thrill of it or for the power and notoriety it brings. Politics was not the meat grinder of principles for Cleveland that it is for so many others.

The Statesman

What qualities define a statesman? He or she doesn’t seek public office for personal gain or because it’s the only job he or she knows how to do. Like ancient Rome’s Cincinnatus or America’s own George Washington, the statesman takes time out from a life of accomplishment to serve the general welfare. He stands for a principled vision, not for what he thinks citizens will fall for. He is well informed about the vicissitudes of human nature, the lessons of history, the role of ideas, and the economics of the marketplace.

The statesman is a truth-seeker, which means he is more likely to do what’s right than what may be politically popular at the moment. You know where he stands because he says what he means and means what he says. He elevates public discussion because he knows what he’s talking about. He does not engage in class warfare or in other divisive or partisan tactics that pull people apart. He does not cynically buy votes with the money his taxes take from others. He may even judge his success in office as much by how many laws he repealed or vetoed as by how many he passed. (Cleveland vetoed more bills than all his predecessors combined.)

Grover Cleveland is my model candidate and model president. I’m betting that this fall’s campaign will only make me miss him all the more.

Lawrence Reed is the president of the Foundation for Economic Education.

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

Ice and Economics – Article by David J. Hebert

Ice and Economics – Article by David J. Hebert

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David J. Hebert
July 21, 2012
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What can ice teach us about economics? We’ll see, but let’s begin with some fundamentals.

Prices, property rights, and profit (and loss) lead to information, incentives, and innovation. This simple statement contains nearly every lesson necessary for a free and prosperous society. But what do these words mean?

Prices convey information about relative scarcities and communicate to us the relative value of competing uses of a resource. They also economize on the acquisition of knowledge. When we see the price of a resource rise, market actors understand the need to use less of the resource. What they don’t know, however, is whether this rise is due to a disaster that destroyed some of the stock of that resource (an inward supply shift) or if a new, more valuable use for that resource has been discovered (an outward demand shift). These facts are irrelevant for a person who is currently using the resource, but from a societal level, her using less is necessary. If there is a disaster, we would want people to use less of it so that everyone else can still use some. If there is a new, more valuable use discovered, we would want the original users to use less so that more could be allocated towards this new use.

The Right to Exclude

Property rights refers not only to the right to use a resource, but also to the right to exclude others from its use. In this sense property rights provide the incentive to allocate the use of a resource efficiently across time, for example, to conserve it for later. With firmly established and enforced property rights, not only does the owner not have to worry about someone else taking his things but he also doesn’t have to rush out to gather the resources as quickly as he can. A situation where there are no property rights is susceptible to what is called the “tragedy of the commons,” where the resource gets depleted too quickly and never has a chance to replenish.

Profit (and loss) leads to innovation. Earning a profit is akin to being rewarded for doing something good. Suffering a loss is the opposite, a punishment for doing something wrong. In this case, the deed being done is the attempt to allocate scarce resources to where their will earn their highest return. People who successfully do this are rewarded with monetary gain, which we call “profit.” People who fail to do this experience what we call “loss.” In doing so, economic actors learn what works and what does not. Reducing the profitability of an activity through taxes or legislation or sheltering people from losses, therefore, acts to retard this learning process and stifles innovation.

This lesson is exemplified in early nineteenth-century Boston with the rise of the American natural ice trade. In 1806 Frederic Tudor sailed a ship full of ice from Boston to the Bahamas. Two years earlier Tudor had begun experimenting with insulation with the goal of bringing ice to the Bahamas.  When he was ready to set sail, he found that the ship captains refused to carry his cargo for fear of damaging their vessels. So he bought his own brig, the Favorite, and set sail February 10, 1806. He arrived in Martinique with a large quantity of ice still intact and began selling. The Bahamians loved the ice, which they had never seen before. Yet that first year Tudor lost a substantial sum of money, although he proved that ice could be shipped to the Bahamas. Now the objective became doing it at a profit.  Convinced his idea would be wildly successful, he continued his attempts to drive down costs and increase demand.

Higher Return

Meanwhile, as the price of the ice on the ponds rose, the people of Boston gained the information that the ice would bring a higher return in the Bahamas, thus they used less themselves and sold the ice to the Bahamians. In 1840 the ponds in the Boston area were explicitly divided, giving each person on the lake the right to exclude everyone else from harvesting any ice that wasn’t theirs. This allowed Tudor, for example, to invest in his ice and let it freeze longer so that it could better survive the long journey from Boston to India, which entailed crossing the equator twice and sailing around the tip of Africa. As Tudor earned profit from his venture, more people were attracted to the ice.

To continue to earn a profit, therefore, he had to find a way to outcompete everyone else. In 1825 Tudor enlisted the help of Nathaniel Wyeth, one of his suppliers. Tudor noticed that Wyeth’s ice was always significantly cheaper than everyone else’s and was cut in neater blocks which packed more easily. Wyeth had converted some old farm plows into ice-cutting plows and had fastened horseshoes with spikes to allow horses to pull these modified plows across the ice. By scoring the ice in such a fashion, Wyeth could break uniform sized blocks much quicker than his competitors, who were using hand saws that produced very rough and uneven edges.

These wouldn’t be the only contributions of Wyeth, as he went on to invent many other cost saving techniques. For example, Wyeth developed a conveyor-belt system that would haul the ice from the pond into the waiting icehouse.  He also invented bigger plows that could cut more blocks at once and poles that were used to guide the floating ice blocks onto the conveyor belt;  refined the above-ground icehouse, which allowed ice to be stored anywhere in the world for months on end without any external source of refrigeration.

New Insulation

Tudor and Wyeth also experimented with new means of insulating the ice from the heat, discovering that sawdust was not only a fantastic insulator but was also cheaply available from the sawmills around Boston. They also taught their customers new ways to use the ice, including making ice cream and storing the ice in iceboxes to preserve foods longer.

In short the three Ps lead to the three Is: Prices, property rights, and profit (and loss) lead to information, incentives, and innovation.  With these firmly in place, a free and prosperous society will follow.

David Hebert is a Ph.D. Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

This article was originally published by The Foundation for Economic Education.

Frontier-Making Private Initiatives: Examples from History – Article by G. Stolyarov II

Frontier-Making Private Initiatives: Examples from History – Article by G. Stolyarov II

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G. Stolyarov II
July 8, 2012
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In my video “SpaceX, Neil deGrasse Tyson, & Private vs. Government Technological Breakthroughs”, I provided a brief discussion of notable counterexamples to Neil deGrasse Tyson’s assertions that private enterprise does not have the resources or exploratory orientation to open up radically new frontiers. Tyson argues that only well-funded government efforts can open up space or could have opened up the New World. History, however, offers many examples of precisely what Tyson denies to be possible: private enterprise breaking new ground and making the exploration of a frontier possible. Indeed, in many of these cases, governments only entered the arena later, once private inventors or entrepreneurs have already established an industry in which governments could get involved. Here, I offer a somewhat more thorough list of such examples of groundbreaking and well-known private initiatives, as well as links to further information about each. I may also update this list as additional examples occur to me.

The Industrial Revolution: The Industrial Revolution – the explosion of technologies for mass production during the late 18th and early 19th centuries – itself arose out of private initiative. The extensive Wikipedia entry on the Industrial Revolution shows that virtually every one of the major inventions that made it possible was created by a private individual and put into commercial use by private entrepreneurs. This paradigm shift, more than any other, rescued the majority of humankind from the brink of subsistence and set the stage for the high living standards we enjoy today.

Automobile: The automobile owes its existence to ingenious tinkerers, inventors, and entrepreneurs. The first self-propelled vehicle was invented circa 1769 by Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot. Cugnot did work on experiments for the French military and did receive a pension from King Louis XV for his inventions. However, subsequent developments that made possible the automobile occurred solely due to private initiative. The first internal combustion engines were independently developed circa 1807 by the private inventors Nicéphore Niépce and François Isaac de Rivaz. For the remainder of the 19th century, innovations in automobile technology were carried forward by a succession of tinkerers. The ubiquity and mass availability of the automobile owe their existence to the mass-production techniques pioneered by Henry Ford in the early 20th century.

Great Northern Railway: While some railroads, such as the notorious repeatedly bankrupt Transcontinental Railroad in the United States, received government subsidies, many thriving railroads were fully funded and operated privately. James J. Hill’s Great Northern Railway – which played a pivotal role in the development of the Pacific Northwest – is an excellent example.

Electrification: The infusion of cheap, ubiquitous artificial light into human societies during the late 19th centuries owes its existence largely to the work of two private inventors and entrepreneurs: Nicola Tesla and Thomas Edison.

Computing: The first computers, too, were the products of private tinkering. A precursor, the Jacquard Loom, was developed by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1801. The concept for the first fully functional computer was developed by Charles Babbage in 1837 – though Babbage did not have the funds to complete his prototype. The Wikipedia entry on the history of computing shows that private individuals contributed overwhelmingly to the theoretical and practical knowledge needed to construct the first fully functioning general-purpose computers in the mid-20th century. To be sure, some of the development took place in government-funded universities or was done for the benefit of the United States military. However, it is undeniable that we have private entrepreneurs and companies to thank for the introduction of computers and software to the general public beginning in the 1970s.

Civilian Internet: While the Internet began as a US military project (ARPANET) in the 1960s, it was not until it was opened to the private market that its effects on the world became truly groundbreaking. An excellent discussion of this development can be found in Peter Klein’s essay, “Government Did Invent the Internet, But the Market Made It Glorious”.

Human Genome Project: While the United States government’s Human Genome Project began first in 1990, it was overtaken by the privately funded genome-sequencing project of J. Craig Venter and his company Celera. Celera started its work on sequencing the human genome in 1998 and completed it in 2001 at approximately a tenth of the cost of the federally funded project. The two projects published their results jointly, but the private project was far speedier and more cost-efficient.

Private Deep-Space Asteroid-Hunting Telescope: This initiative is in the works, but Leonard David of SPACE.com writes that Project Sentinel is expected to be launched in 2016 using SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. This is an unprecedented private undertaking by the B612 Foundation, described by Mr. David as “a nonprofit group of scientists and explorers that has long advocated the exploration of asteroids and better space rock monitoring.” Project Sentinel aims to vastly improve our knowledge of potentially devastating near-Earth asteroids and to map 90% of them within 5.5 years of operation. The awareness conferred by this project might just save humanity itself.

With this illustrious history, private enterprise may yet bring us even greater achievements – from the colonization of Mars to indefinite human life extension. In my estimation, the probability of such an outcome far exceeds that of a national government undertaking such ambitious advancements of our civilization.