On nukes and speaking Russian
In response to my previous post, someone on a message board replied to the primary question ("What might have been?") with, "We would be speaking Russian." And another commenter also indicated he believed the Soviets would or could have developed nuclear weapons first and conquered the world in the absence of the Manhattan Project. In this particular example, the blame appears to fall back on the Manhattan Project itself, since Stalin didn't have a nuke program until he heard about the one in the U.S.
But I think a more important point for the general case is that a free society, unencumbered by destructive taxation and regulation, would be extremely wealthy and highly versatile. Such a society would have people and firms that would have total mastery over information gathering and would know about a foreign power's weapons plans in short order. The idea that a wealthy, free, and fiercely independent people would not spontaneously organize to prevent the development or use of such a weapon is absurd. Not to mention that a society that had eliminated the state or reduced it to the point that it was not engaging in military adventures (and the resultant weapons development) would not even represent a threat meriting the creation of a civilization-endangering weapon by a foreign state.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
State science and what might have been
With all the news lately about the Large Hadron Collider and new NASA programs, I think it's important to ask a fundamental question: Why should the state be involved in funding and conducting science? That is, why should one group of people take up arms and expropriate vast sums of money from other people in order to do science? From a moral standpoint, the answer seems obvious to me: they shouldn't. Like all endeavors of the state, it's an exploitative relationship and has no place in civilized society.
But, some will say, what about the Apollo Program? What about all the discoveries that happen at places like the LHC? What about the achievements of the U.S. federal labs? What about all the university science funded by the government? Aren't these worthwhile advances? Wouldn't many of these things be impossible without violent exploitation? Well, to these people I would simply ask: What might have been?
What might have been the course of scientific progress in the U.S. if the state had not spent the past century confiscating untold billions of dollars from private individuals and directing it in the way that it did? Well, we know that all that money (all things being equal) would have been directed toward market-demanded production. Some would have gone toward privately-conducted science. In fact, without government crowding, there would have been quite a bit more private science, and private science is responsive to what consumers actually want. State science has only a rough approximation of this in the form of the pressure of public opinion.
For all we know, market-driven scientific progress could well have far exceeded what we've ended up with. Maybe some scientific knowledge and technologies we have now wouldn't exist. But other discoveries--again, more closely-aligned with consumer demand--may have been made that would have resulted in an overall higher standard of living than we currently enjoy. In fact, that's likely. With only a pale imitation of the cost-control pressures of the market, government science will tend to be far less efficient, solving problems and developing new technologies in much more round-about and resource-intensive ways than market-driven science. So, no, we probably wouldn't have had an Apollo Program, that expensive and embarrassing instance of international "sword fighting" (if you know what I mean). Rather, the natural pressures of the market may have resulted in private, competing firms developing advanced, low-cost methods of reaching orbit and extracting commercially valuable resources from the moon, Mars, asteroids, etc. And we probably wouldn't have the LHC. Instead, perhaps companies in fields as diverse as transportation, computing, communications, and medical technology would have developed a variety of cheaper and more effective ways of probing the fundamental particles and forces of reality in search of new technologies for the products demanded by their customers.
And it all would have been done through peaceful interaction among free people seeking to profit by providing one another with value rather than by violence of a parasitic political class exploiting a productive population in order to score political points.
The question is not, "How could we have X,Y, and Z without the state?" The question is, "In the absence of violent, inefficient, and politically driven state science, what might have been?"
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
News efficiency mandates
Just wanted to pass along this bit of awesomeness from Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek:
Let’s Improve the Efficiency of News Reporting
Here’s a letter to the New York Times:
You argue that a government-mandated higher fuel-efficiency standard “will yield a trifecta of benefits: reduced dependence on foreign oil, fewer greenhouse gas emissions, and consumer savings at the pump” (“Everybody Wins,” April 2).
By this logic, you should also support a government-mandated news-efficiency standard – that is, a requirement that you report and editorialize on any given amount of news using fewer words and less paper than you now use. This standard would yield a trifecta of benefits: reduced dependence on foreign lumber (we import much from Canada), fewer greenhouse-gas emissions (transporting slimmed-down newspapers would burn less fuel than is burned to transport today’s bulky, news-inefficient papers), and consumer savings at the newsstand (using less ink and less paper will make news-efficient newspapers less pricey than today’s ink and wood-pulp guzzlers).
Everybody wins.
Sincerely,
Donald J. BoudreauxWhen you look carefully, likely market failures are all around us, just begging to be corrected by the state.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!